Google - talk to us. Please.

I was on a jolly with a few fairly bright but non-technical chaps recently and they were outraged that Google can ban sites, penalise sites and so on. Their view was that Google is now so powerful that they need regulating and should be far more transparent.

I think they have a point. We run sites that are well put together, fast, easy to use, etc, etc but some rank well, some don't. We are 90% certain that one site in particular has some sort of a penalty on it but there's nothing in Google Webmaster Tools, no email and of course, no communcation with Google.

Would we pay to have a contact at Google that would just say "yay " or "nay"? Absolutely. Even large corporates have to go through their AdWords manager to try and find out simple, basic stuff that Google just doesn't report on.

I have to point out here that I realise how difficult it is to do what Google do but it needs to change. If someone, a politician perhaps, started talking about making Google more transparent I'm sure they'd get a huge amount of backing from the webmaster / SEO community.