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barrkel, I can speak to some of the thinking on the search result ranking side. I believe the feeling has been that asking people to pay for support creates worse incentives, because it turns something that people shouldn't have to do (contact Google for support) into a source of revenue.

It's a similar situation to pay-for-inclusion in the search index: a search engine should include as many pages/sites in its index as possible, and if someone can pay the search engine to include their site, then it creates a weird incentive for the search engine to not do a great job of crawling the web.

At least on the organic/ranking side, that's at least part of the reason why Google has never done pay-for-inclusion or pay-for support for webmasters.



it turns something that people shouldn't have to do (contact Google for support) into a source of revenue

That's why the model stipulates that [the money] is refundable in the case where there's a genuine grievance


Define genuine grievance?


Fully agree about perverse incentives in search result / ranking, but do not think it applies in nearly the same way when there's a business relationship, such as adwords etc.




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