[macoughl]

>So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google?

During this "crackdown campaign" Google has been on, I have sat in on meetings at large clients where they've pulled sites that are supposedly link farms (according to google) and put together an ad buy on behalf of competitors meant to cause these penalties to be levied and WMT messages to be sent.

[ryan-allen]

Sounds like a classic Bait and Switch, albeit a good 10 year long one on Google's behalf.

They needed to provide a useful service to begin with to get the traction (good search algorithms for the web-that-is), but now that they are the incumbent, it is more in their interests to penalise website owners and force them to buy ads.

It's sad, but it's normal monopolist behaviour.