Matt,
Would it be possible/financially practically for Google to offer a premium support option that would pay for itself?
Figure out how much it costs to respond to someone, offer that as a flat fee with a clear indication, that paying only gets you a consult on what's wrong with your site, and not any promise that it will get you reinstated. Basically what you did in your comments above.
I would personally make it expensive to make sure people don't try continually working the system by paying for the consult to get inside information about how to rank higher on Google.
I work in a support center, so I definitely recognize that it's expensive and difficult to do well at scale, so I appreciate that you're looking into how to do it!
It would be possible. I think Google has a bit of a historical aversion to it because it reminds us of pay-for-inclusion, in which someone would pay for their web page to be crawled/indexed.
Larry Page was especially critical of pay-for-inclusion because it skews your incentives: if you don't crawl the web well, then people pay you to fix your own shortcomings, which in turn encourages you to have more shortcomings.
I think Google also comes from the perspective of self-service AdWords being successful, so the idea of self-service (free) diagnostics really appeals to us. That's why we've put a lot of effort into our free webmaster tools.
I wouldn't be philosophically opposed to a pay-for-support system if it were done well, but it would be a tricky thing to get right. Normally when we consider it, we end up saying things like "Why don't we just try to make it so that people don't need that option?"
>Larry Page was especially critical of pay-for-inclusion because it skews your incentives: if you don't crawl the web well, then people pay you to fix your own shortcomings, which in turn encourages you to have more shortcomings.
It would be fine provided you explicitly didn't turn it into a profit center, and just made it pay for the people's time.
Torching people's websites and shrouding the reasons why in mystery skews webmasters' incentives - away from creating high quality content and towards figuring out how to circumvent the latest change to the search algo.
>I wouldn't be philosophically opposed to a pay-for-support system if it were done well, but it would be a tricky thing to get right. Normally when we consider it, we end up saying things like "Why don't we just try to make it so that people don't need that option?"
I'm sure you could do that tomorrow if you wanted, but explaining in perfect detail exactly why somebody's (legitimate) website got torched would open the details of your algorithm right up, which would not only open it up to gaming, but would open it up to being copied.
You really could use a team of humans who can explain in human terms (as opposed to algorithmic) exactly why webmasters' sites got torched for violating the spirit of your "high quality content rule". Those same humans could equally feed back data to the search team where in their opinion an algorithm accidentally torched something it probably shouldn't have.
> I wouldn't be philosophically opposed to a pay-for-support system if it were done well, but it would be a tricky thing to get right. Normally when we consider it, we end up saying things like "Why don't we just try to make it so that people don't need that option?"
This is going on the wall here at the office. Thank you.
Figure out how much it costs to respond to someone, offer that as a flat fee with a clear indication, that paying only gets you a consult on what's wrong with your site, and not any promise that it will get you reinstated. Basically what you did in your comments above.
I would personally make it expensive to make sure people don't try continually working the system by paying for the consult to get inside information about how to rank higher on Google.
I work in a support center, so I definitely recognize that it's expensive and difficult to do well at scale, so I appreciate that you're looking into how to do it!