Yeah I know – like the world needs another ‘Google are bastards’ post, but I think Google is biting off more than it can chew. The QDF thing, allied to Vince is making for horribly variable results and I’ve lost track of the number of rollbacks and shuffles and tests I’ve seen over recent weeks.

A concrete example is in the cruise sector, where I’m currently doing a bit of work. For a good week, The BBC ranked for “cruise” on the basis of a story about Usain Bolt ‘cruising to victory’ in the 100 metres. Now, I understand that the BBC has such incredible domain power that it very often ranks for all kinds of stuff on an accidental basis, but really handing them a top 10 listing on a commercial phrase for something like that is just horrible. And that’s before we get to any number of news stories about Connor Cruise (not even Tom – who at least has made the effort to become famous) that are stinking up the rankings. And if that’s not bad enough, we have things like Windermere lake cruises and Loch Ness cruises outranking somebody like Princess and Royal Caribbean – two of the world’s biggest cruise lines.

You can make all the excuses you like about how Google uses backlinks, or the age of domains or whatever you like but the fact still stands: this is a shit result.

Now, everyone made a load of hee-haw about Vince and how brands would get natural equity in verticals where they were strong but I can point to places where that just ain’t so. Matt Cutts subtly made the point that really ‘Vince’ was just a natural extension of what has gone before and that brands wouldn’t automatically get power. At first I was sceptical of this – in the face of lots of examples that people pointed out about big names ranking suddenly for competitive terms where previously they hadn’t.

My gut feeling now is that Google actually went after affiliates, sitewides and advertising links in key verticals in a big way and the whole ‘brands get power’ thing was just a smokescreen for a clean-up job.

So if brands can’t rely on their brand to rank, we’re back to distortions and QDF. With my ultra-cynical head on, I see Google making a tidy killing out of PPC every time they deem a certain result as deserving of QDF. Ranking yesterday for ‘legal highs’? Well today it’s in the news so we’re giving your ranking to the BBC, Guardian, Sky News and some YouTube videos. You want traffic? Pay me.

OK – so that’s very fucking cynical, I admit. But I don’t think QDF is a massive boon to searchers. If I want newsy results about something, Google already provide me with that channel. If I want to know what the blogosphere are talking about, Google provide me with that channel. Lumping them periodically into the main search makes about as much sense as the ‘trending topics’ bullshit on Twitter.

I’m seeing too much crap in Google right now. Is it as bad as the shitty spam nonsense that used to clag up the internets? Probably not – but a reliance on backlinks, allied to QDF is just making it all too messy as far as I’m concerned…