Google vs. PayPal; Google vs. BMW.de (and sheep satire)

In today's IT Blogwatch, we look at possible new competition for PayPal and at Google "forgetting" BMW Germany. Not to mention what happens when sheep take offense...

Know your competition seems to be the mantra at PayPal. As Gary Price notes, "PayPal is preparing its forces and resources against Google's plans to make a play in the online payment space (formerly Google Wallet) or what is now being referred to as GBuy ... President of eBay's PayPal division, told the WSJ that what Google is up to is a "very legitimate" threat to his company ... We also know that Google is already handling the payments for videos sold through the Google Video Store and extended services for Google Earth. Last March, Google formed the Google Payment Corporation." [If it reduces PayPal's fees, your humble blogwatcher is all for it]

» John Agno: "The problem is that PayPal needs to expand beyond its core eBay's auction site users to keep generating more profits. Most recently, PayPal generated 23% of parent eBay's total $1.3 billion quarterly revenue."

» R. Nelson: "It’s always nice to see some competition. But, I am not sure if I am ready to switch off Paypal at this time. Also, to be honest I am not sure who excited I am to see this service being put out by Google. I think the public opinion of Google may have changed slightly over the past few months."

BMW has been 'blacklisted' by Google -- Ricoh may be next, or so Google staffer Matt Cutts indicates: "This week our webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index, and ricoh.de will be removed soon for similar reasons ... a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of 'Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users' ... some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google's webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded." [Your humble blogwatcher can't help but wonder whether Google would still think the text at question was "deceptive" if it was written in English]

» John Battelle: "In a move that analysts say indicates a problem that still needs a solution, Google has removed BMW's German Web site from its index for violating Google's guidelines against trying to manipulate search results ... the site would show up one way when the search engine visited the page but when a Web user opened the page, a redirect mechanism would display a completely different page."

» Mike Slocombe [warning: possibly not safe for work]: "Keyword-optimised 'fake' pages created purely to attract search engine robots are known as 'doorway' or 'gateway' pages and have long been employed by the porn industry to boost the profile of a site ... It's probable that BMW enlisted the help of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts who use a variety of cunning tricks to boost a client's search engine ranking ... Although it's good to see search engine cheats getting slapped down, in reality it's not going to make a great deal of difference to BMW in the long term. But we suspect that some P45 forms are being handed out as we speak..." [i.e. pink slips, or whatever they have in Germany]

» Lee Odden, Online Marketing Blog: "Notice to search marketers: Your brand will not save you from the consequences of screwing with search engines ... I wonder how BMW Public Relations is going to handle this? Do you think they'll 'out' the SEO?" Comments to Lee's blog came from Daniel: "This really smacks of Google flexing their muscles - but good on them for doing it, it sends a very clear message about how not to get ranking in a search engine."

» Jeremy Zawodny: "I'm officially puzzled by those who are complaining about Google's treatment of BMW's SEO techniques. Like anyone else who violates their guidelines, BMW is subject to the consequences. Take, for example, the Google Orwellian story on Publishing 2.0 ... Oh, cry me a river!  Google is not some public utility or government service. They can do whatever they want with their search index: make it better, make it worse, censor it, randomize it, or sell printed copies on a street corner. Why? Because it's their index ... The ultimate checks and balances are at work in Google's case. If its users start to dislike the results they get, they'll seek out alternatives. Google's power will diminsh."

Buffer overflow:

• Richi Jennings: More on Goodmail's wasted opportunity
• TechieDolphin: Can We Keep a Culture of Innovation?
• David Sifry: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
• Erick Schonfeld: The Audience is the Network (And That's No Joke)
• Tom Gordon: We Know Where You Are
• Scott P. Shaffer:  Philips Makes Plastic RFID Tags
• Alan Nolan-Davies: Lifetime Support for Oracle Databases as of 9.2.0.8
• Gizmodo: Google and VW Join Forces
• Andrew Clifford: System governance needs a framework
• Ken "Caesar" Fisher: Do we need sidebars? Jim Allchin thinks so.
• Techdirt: SunnComm Says It Will Change
• Glenn Fleishman: Speakeasy Says No Deal with Fon
• Ed Foster: ETrade Blames Patriot Act for Phishing-Like Letter
• RFID Weblog: Bar Codes - The Come From Behind Kid
• Martin MC Brown: Downloading music is not always cost effective
• Alex Scoble: Performance tips for your Windows PC
• Alex Scoble: Get ripped off at iTunes store for low quality 128bit
• Robert L. Mitchell: At Demo: Panoratio's innovative analytics tool
• Martin McKeay: Blogging securely
• Shark Tank: So You're Having No Problems?
• Global News Update: Monday, Feb. 6, 2006
• Heidi Biggar: The word is out on VTL
• Douglas Schweitzer: After all, we are only human

And finally... When sheep take offense -- BAAAAA! [You're fired -Ed.]

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk. Also contributing to today's post: Judi Dey, our very own Antipodean.