Is Google Overstepping Their Bounds?

As I’ve been striving to learn how to build a profitable website, I’ve been following the recent debacle with Google.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Google. I’ve been using their search forever, and it would take me a while to recover if something ever happened to g-mail. But even so, the purpose of a search engine is to give me as many possible web sites as they can find for the subject I’m looking up. If a search engine doesn’t do this, then what’s the purpose of using them, especially with so many other options out there.

Also, I’m not talking about Page Rank. Page rank is a purely Google invention, and although it’s become a nice indication of how a web site is doing, there are other things I can use, and I’m most definitely not going to stop visiting my favorite sites just because Google drops their ranks.

Many sites have articles trying to figure out Google’s plan behind the recent rank drops. I found Search Engine Watch’s article today to be especially interesting:

Links can get a value placed on them by a variety of other means. However, I would be very cautious about being complacent about this. Google has demonstrated in the past a willingness to send a warning shot across the bow before taking greater action. For example, many people have seen 30 day penalties (removal from the index) applied to their web site, only to bounce back.

When I discussed this with Matt Cutts , he made it clear that Google uses this approach to provide warnings to webmasters to repent their sins and repair the problems that Google detected. Perhaps this is more of the same. It may be that web sites who continue to leave their paid links up will then be subjected to a greater penalty, such as removal, or a rankings drop comparable to the PageRank drop. Only time will tell us how this will unfold.will tell us how this will unfold.

What do you think? Is Google making a mistake? If they start removing blogs from their listings because the blogs refuse to remove their “follow me” links or do any of the other things that Google may be trying to correct, will people start turning to other search engines instead? Does this move have the potential to affect Google at all?