This has been being doing rounds in my head for a long time, are majority of webmasters afraid of google?

I mean when I go to Digital Point or for that matter any other webmasters forum, I find people asking questions about what is right and what is wrong “according to google”.

It seems people are genuinely terrorized by the fact that one wrong move of theirs, might cause google to drop them out of SERPs or apply penalties on their sites or get their adsense accounts banned.

I am not saying most of these fears are unfounded, however when a person feels they have to build and maintain their site according to the guidelines set by google and not by what they feel is best for their visitors. That is when I feel all this has gone a little out of hand.

Are we today building sites to please the google search engine bots?

Are we taking Matt Cutt’s ideas as the de facto rules of developing websites and implementing them with out thinking for a second about our consumers and visitors?

Are we becoming the geeky kid in the school whose only thoughts in the morning bus ride to school is how to avoid confronting the bully?

Has google come to a position where it can dictate how the internet is run and we as webmasters are supposed to oblige with out raising a voice?

Or is it a being blown out of proportion by people who don’t know any thing about web development and SEO/SEM firms out to make a quick buck?