Google...friend or foe

[SEO Kid]

Gooday to you guys

Im just wondering...To me Google does not really like SEO as its a process of manipulation to its results.

BUT

Now Google has implemented some tools to help webmasters in the venture of SEO such as Google sitemaps and google analytics and recently there has been talk about Google alerting you via email if you site has been banned or penalized.

So thins brings me to my question. Has Google just realized that there is nothing that they can do to avoid people manipulating their SERPS so now they rather try and work with them and create an understanding between the webmaster and the Search Engine itself?

OR

Is Google providing tools that just gives them more and more information about you as a webmaster and your site(s) so that it could make it easier for them to do whatever suites them wether it be a banning of your site or a penalty?

How do you guys feel about this?

[Paz]

Hi,

it's a very good question. Google say they don't like attempts to manipulate their rankings, but I think they mean black hat seo tactics such as cloaking (showing one page to the search engines, and another page to visitors) hidden text etc.

There's usually at least one Google representative at the major search engine conferences, and one of there workers, Matt Cutts, even has an SEO blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

So Google aren't necessarily against people who want to make their websites more search engine (and visitor!) friendly, and I'm sure they benefit from the feedback they get from SEO experts who often understand more about their search engine than they do!!

Cheers,
Paz.