While you are probably right about this being immoral and maybe illegal, I've had to clean up my share of xrumerservice.org spam from forums and can tell you that I'm no longer against immoral practices if they hit this specific guy. The amount of other peoples time this guy wastes is probably several life-times every fucking day. I think you have to be a forum admin to understand the deep, deep urge that can build up to hit this particular spammer as hard as possible and not even caring anymore if that will get yourself in legal troubles.

> ... [P]ublishing private info like this ... doesn't serve a purpose

Come on, that is obviously false. If being a blackhat is likely to result in bad stuff, fewer people will be blackhats. (It's obviously still vigilante justice, with all the usual pitfalls. But immoral doesn't imply ineffective.)

Even if Google could determine which businesses, products, and services were 'best', it wouldn't matter to spammers. Presumably most of the participants in Blackhat SEO don't offer the 'best'. The driving motive is that they want their stuff to appear in people's search results, not some altruistic goal of providing people access to their high quality offerings.

If small businesses are spending time writing articles that only Google will read - they are doing it wrong.

I imagine the problem with most of these small struggling businesses isn't a bias in Google's algorithm, but rather they have entered a highly saturated market with a mundane/unmemorable/uncreative website that no one wants to visit.

My point is that they shouldn't have to write articles at all if that's not what their business is about. How good you are at writing (or how much you have to spend on it) and how much you've written isn't a good indicator at all for judging how good your product and customer service is. It's actually a pretty horrible one.

The Google algorithm is heavily biased towards the big guys who can afford to buy content, publicity and links. I'm obviously not talking about content/information businesses (where content obviously should be king), I'm talking about the small businesses who are creating small niche products.

There's only so much you can write about door stoppers for example until you start repeating yourself. Then you're already in greyhat territory since you're essensially spinning content. After a while you start realizing that nobody is ever going to link to your articles about door stoppers, so you start building links manually. Then you're already blackhat.

For a lot of small non-content businesses the choice is often between blackhat or not making any money (from the internet at least). You can't blame them from chosing the first option.

As the other commenter said, not making money isn't an excuse to start spamming people. It's a greedy response, profiteering off dishonest practises that waste other peoples time who have to spend time cleaning up all this stuff.

Also if I want to buy door stoppers, I'd much rather Amazon came up in my search than a small site I've never heard of which I'm far less likely to spend money on. Trust is a big part of search results.

If a company tells me they can't outrank Amazon or some other big popular site for door stoppers I would ask them why they are trying to sell the same door stoppers as Amazon is, you're competing with a giant on a product no one will want to buy from you. You need to offer something Amazon doesn't. Maybe this is hand painted door stoppers, funny shaped ones, those are actual niches you can profit off. Door stoppers shouldn't be considered a niche in my opinion, it's far too broad.

In regards to the lazy trend of 'niche information sites' that have low quality content and adverts to make money from, aimed to be the middle man between a search and a product sale, these are the bottom of the barrel websites and I hope every time I search in Google that these sites don't come up. They also waste everyone's time, are extremely uncreative and are diluting quality in the general web experience for everyone.

No, I'm pretty sure I can blame spammers and people that employ them for spamming. It isn't Google's fault and it being their "only" option to make money is not an excuse either.

Way more immoral than auto-posting some annoying comments? Really?

Morality is a social construct, a contract that we all essentially buy into. Immorality is the violation of that.

If anything is immoral it's stealing 100s of 1000s of people's precious time (multiple times per day) with robotic systems--simply so you can make a few bucks, by providing no social value whatsoever. It undermine the fabric of what holds us together.

Personally, the response seems elegant and appropriate. A highly targeted activity that is likely to affect only the intended target. Maybe someone that lives in Latvia will go buy a cream pie and throw it in his face as he leaves his house!