Today I saw the news story about the beijingticketing.com ticket scam. The site ripped off hundreds of thousands of dollars from people trying to score tickets to the Beijing Olympics. This is truly sad for those that were trying to buy tickets and now will not be able to attend the Olympics.

According to many of the people, beijing ticketing appeared to be a completely legitimate website. This brought up a question in my mind. “What exactly constitutes a legitimate site?”

“As stated earlier this week, “beijingticketing.com” appeared first on Google searches for Olympic tickets, even ahead of the official Olympic site, making the distinction between ”questionable” and “legitimate” operation more difficult to discern(Pat Imig).”

Well if you believe that only legitimate sites can reach #1 on search engines(Google), then I got some swamp land I’d like to sell you. Just because a site ranks high in the search engines does not mean that it is on the up and up. Black hat SEO tactics can easily help you reach the front page of Google and other search engines.

I believe overall, that Google does a good job at delivering us the most relevant sites for our searches. I also think that Google will also try and make it more difficult to rank high in the search engines in light of situations like this.

By the way, as of me writing this, beijingticketing.com is still ranking in the #4 spot on Google even though the site is down.

What do you think? Will stories like this one force Google to rethink the way that they judge sites and rank them?