Conflict of Interests for Google.

Well, it’s official…Google are now the proud owners of Double Click.

This surely creates the largest conflict of interests the internet giant, and for that matter, the rest of the search marketing industry has ever faced.

Effectively Google is now in the Search Marketing business.

The call has been made by SEO supremo Danny Sullivan for Google to quickly drop the Performics arm of the DoubleCLick stable. In an open letter  he makes a few very relevent points relating to why Google needs to drop Performics to maintain it’s own integrity. Amonst other things he points out the following:

“Performics is a long-time leader in the SEO and search marketing space. It provides paid search services (getting you listed on search engines like Google itself through ads), as well as “natural search” or search engine optimization work:

Using robust technology, the DoubleClick Performics’ team scientifically optimizes existing client sites to create new, dynamic, crawler-friendly sites highlighting brand, nonbrand and long-tail keywords. Our experts methodically optimize copy and content for each page to boost page rankings. DoubleClick Performics understands the importance of creating an NSO culture at your company, and one that is not necessarily dependent on the bandwidth of your IT department. Our customized solutions combat existing issues and leverage Web 2.0 technology to boost rankings:

There’s nothing wrong with SEO. Even Google tells you this. But on that same page, Google also says:

While Google doesn’t have relationships with any SEOs…

Now it does — it owns an SEO. And therein lies the problem. Even if Performics is kept completely separate from the Google search team, there’s the impression that Performics might have some special “in” with Google’s non-paid search results. After all, Google owns it! It’s also not hard to imagine that despite all the best intentions, some new sales rep might pitch that Performics has some type of in. That a bad thing. FYI, Performics already touts its relationship on the paid side, as do many other search marketing firms.”

This has to be  detrimental to any trust that Google has built up with the search industry over the years.

We have to agree with Danny that Google needs to make a further statement to clarify it’s position and preferably consider phasing out the Performics arm of the Doubleclick aquisition.

Dave Keffen

Matt Cutts Interview

Here’s an interesting SMX West piece by Rand Fishkin who managed to catch Matt Cutts for a slightly more in-depth interview regading his role at Google.

Matt Cutts Interview

Matt is his usual forthcoming self, but Rand manages to find out a little more as to whether Matt is simply the PR face of Google or if his opinions are more than the party line.

He also asks what it takes to become part of the Google team and finishes with the usual spam no no’s.

 DAK