I wouldn’t go as far as to say they have the worst customer service on the planet, I’ve seen some pretty bad customer service in my lifetime (but I’m not particularly mentioning 1&1 Internet.)

Google is a different beast when it comes to customer service. They are indeed the first search engine to offer webmaster communications, but they are lacking in some areas still. They are trying to improve it though, which is a good sign.

Matt points out some good links for you to read as well, official and non-official.

The official webmaster blog would be the other place to check out: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ and they done several posts just this past week.

Google has the worst customer service on the planet. They are getting too big for their panties and are following the same path that Microsoft and other powerful companies have. A search engine who responds to webmasters will eventually trump the big G.

Here’s some food for thought. Setup some sort of private e-mail account that will let you manage all your private contacts and then have a general mailbox, such as your account that already exists, and use an auto-responder with something along the lines of recommending to people where they can most likely find their answer.

From my past experience, it’s better to get a response immediately, even if it’s an auto-responder, than it is to get a delayed-automated-response, such as the one I received.

That might help filter out a lot of your junk requests (such as mine :) and let you focus on the serious stuff.

Just my two cents for you. At any rate, would love to hear about how you end up tackling (like a fish! Hey, you should be a fish for Halloween!) the work load.

Some valid points. Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment to prove my point wrong — you’re not a robot :)

So then the basic principal, if I’m understanding you right, is that you are penalizing sites that have irrelevant sponsored links?

That’s fair enough.

I agree, e-mail is very limited in how effective it can actually be because, exactly right as you stated, it only benefits one person — unless that one person were to go post the response. Probably would have been the case here that I would have posted it here and plenty of people would see it.

I know the feelings of being behind on e-mails, at one point I was behind some odd thousand or two e-mails. It’s not fun.

No hard feelings though. Thank you again Matt.

There’s also the issue that email is a 1:1 way of communicating. In the 3-4 minutes to reply to an email, I could also reply on a forum, blog, or start on a blog post that everyone could benefit from (not just one person by email).

The answer to your question is that a page’s reputation can be affected by the sites that they link to. In the specific case you mentioned (http://iwantmyopenid.org/bounty/sponsors), I would worry at least as much about the spammy links showing up on that page, e.g. “sohbetchatsohbet odalarıçetarkadaşchat odalarısohbet chatyonjasohbethiphopchat sohbetsitesohpet” or “online information about pharmacology, drugs and medications” The specific page you asked about has a lot of these spammy links, which suggests that search engines shouldn’t be trusting that page as much as some other pages.

Best wishes, and sorry that I haven’t had the cycles to reply to everyone that emails me recently,
Matt

So then it still begs the question, why are they even bothering with the battle of paid [sponsored] links?

That’s really what I was asking Matt.

Even if they did manually read the e-mail, why would they include, specifically, that it was an automated e-mail?

I’m in contact with Adam Lasnik about it right now and I’m coming to the conlusion of this: Why bother having an inbox if you can’t respond to it.

Let’s change the words in your question for fun: instead of paid links, concentrate on Googles mission: organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It’s essentially impossible right? IMO they’re doing a damn fine job of that anyway, certainly not perfect, but getting better all the time. I don’t think it’s any less impossible than recognizing sponsored links.