Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

I'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad words, they no longer care about the search results, just how much money they make

Also SEO provides at least something for the long tail. My belief is that the algorithm is able to predict what looks like “content” to a broad consumer base. Then the fatter the tail gets the more they manually tweak the results (like editors doing publishing).

What you are saying sounds like hyperbole, but all it takes is for the management within google to blindly chase metrics and they end up doing exactly that.

That's the point - willingly saying that they promote spam sites to milk ad revenue could land them in antitrust trouble. But all they have to so is merely not do anything that would downrank said spam sites, and the outcome is exactly the same yet they are now legally in the clear and can just blame incompetence for the (totally predictable) outcome.

I mean that is exactly what each and every Google team does. There is no decision being made without having the data "supporting" it.

But every graph can be shown nicely and things which are common sense don't need a metric to proof it.

I doubt it works this way. People at Google use search too, and they don't like what they see.

Part of the problem is that they're fighting against financial incentives that they themselves created. There's plenty of upside and little downside to abusing it, so it's just endless whack-a-mole.

Another issue is just how bureaucratic the process has become. They want it to look good to the regulators and the courts, so they put up with a pattern of abuse for five years, then announce some well-reasoned but narrow policy change (e.g. "product reviews now need to be actual hands-on reviews"), and... a month later, spammers are just adding an extra lie on all the fake review websites.

This is a prevalent misconception that assumes advertisers don't care about how their money is spent! Advertisers and Google are actually concerned about SEO garbage. Nowadays, most advertisers tend to pay based on # of conversions, its value and ROI. Those spammy sites usually yield a garbage CVR even though their CTR seems great. Advertisers don't like this.

Looks like people don't acknowledge that # of clicks is no more important metric. That seemed to be important when it was the only meaningful performance metric. But the ultimate metric that matters to money is advertiser budget allocation. If they see Google search performs worse in terms of conversions, they will cut their budget there. And this is the real problem that Google has.

Where else is that money being spent?

Different groups often look at different metrics. It’s possible that the sales group cares about one value while the dev group optimizes to another