Google’s Terms of Service

This is bizarre! I was just creating a “Google Sitemap”:https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/sitemaps/ for a “Florida vacation home rentals”:http://www.daystarvillas.com/ site I manage, and had to sign up for Google Sitemaps. Being a good boy, I read Google’s “Terms of Service”:http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html

Now I’m not sure how many other people have read this, because its terms appear ludicrous. First up is the title: *Google Terms of Service for Your Personal Use*. I’m creating this sitemap for a client, and will be using this as my company’s account to manage his sitemap - invalid already?

Let’s just look at the next bit:

bq. Welcome! By using Google’s search engine or other Google services (”Google Services”), you agree [...] The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales.

Note that Google services include the search engine. Now I don’t know about you, but I certainly use the search engine to increase traffic to my web site for commercial reasons. Every commercial website does it and it’s stupendously important, that’s why the market’s flooded with unethical SEO companies.

So what’s Google saying? Commercial sites cannot post Google Sitemaps because this would be aiming to increase traffic by exposing more of your site to Googlebot?

I could make a guess and say what Google are talking about is people displaying their search results on their own website to attract traffic, but I don’t know what they are prohibiting. It appears most of the options Google is already used for.

Whatever the reason, it would be helpful if Google would clarify their terms to make what’s allowed clearer.