Hey Matt Cutts, if you're reading this, this is an open letter from a white hatter to you. Yes, you can actually talk about white hat stuff on a black hat forum, zomg.
Here's a thought. Instead of trying to "prevent web spam", increasingly removing privacy, and bowing down to or trying to create kudos with large corporations such as SouthWest, how about actually improving Google for every day users? I can understand that 97% of Google's revenue comes from AdWords, but it doesn't mean that your users around the world have to suffer.
I'm not talking about SEO professionals, I'm talking about the every day people. The every day people who catapulted your company to fame. For example, I recently gave a talk to people - all business owners - in my city, and briefly touched on SEO. I talked mostly about the difference between the ads and the organic, as well as the search engine market share for a variety of countries and the trends as well. They all asked me what was up with Google, as they weren't satisfied with it. They weren't talking about it from their own business perspective, they were talking about it from the end user perspective of when they were trying to find something online.
From a SEO'ers perspective, within the last year I attended a professional-grade online marketing conference. At a few talks across the event by very authoritative people in the industry, everybody agreed that Google was turning both greedy, evil, etc. Whatever happened to Google not being evil as one of its mantras? It seems like you've sold your soul to the devil... or maybe you've been in your position for way too long and you need to get down to the grassroots level. Shame on you Google. How about getting back to basics?
