In Rich Tehrani’s blog, I saw this post about KinderStart.com suing Google for blacklisting them. In it, Rich hypothesizes about the possible implications of the lawsuit — rank us or pay — and it does cause me to think about the obvious possibility of Google eventually pushing people to AdWords by blacklisting them.
Google’s not very up-front about what will get your site blacklisted, and as far as I can tell, won’t even verify the blacklisting most of the time. But if you are blacklisted from the organic listings, it can obviously cause a significant drop in traffic. What options are there to replace the traffic? Well, presumably if you fix up the problems with your site, a reinclusion request is the way to go, after you clean up the overzealous SEO techniques which got you blacklisted, but another option is to get yourself in the AdWords PPC program to make sure your site still shows up for the terms you’d previously ranked for. With PPC, you’re going to be adding to Google’s bottom line, something that you don’t do with organic listings.
I don’t think that Google goes nuts with blacklisting, but it’s certainly possible for them to boost revenue through a few select drops, particularly if they’re going to miss numbers if they don’t do something to pick up revenue at the end of a quarter.
In their defense, giving too much information about what thresholds they’ll use to blacklist a site just encourages people to push right up to that line.
A possible compromise would be to e-mail the contacts for the domain when a blacklist happens, with a laundry list of some of the things that were done which caused the ban, and a link to the webmaster guidelines and reinclusion request forms.