Quoted from Google’s own philosophy:-
“The perfect search engine,” says Google co-founder Larry Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” Given the state of search technology today, that’s a far-reaching vision requiring research, development and innovation to realize. Google is committed to blazing that trail.
Bollocks. Complete and utter bollocks. I’d like Google to own up and change this to “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want, unless you are looking to spend money in which case use our sponsored results, keeerrrching!”.
I’ve read so much about Google in the last couple of days that my eyes are bleeding Red, Blue, Yellow and Green. Lets get things clear from the start, this isn’t all about the recent kick in the knackers for websites selling links, it’s about Google’s driving mission to remove business based websites (that includes anybody looking to make money online) from it’s natural search results. You see in Google’s eyes people trying to make money through Google without giving Google a cut are bad, very bad. The first hit came about with the removal of the emphasis from on-the-page to external based factors. Why did this happen? Was it to produce better results or was it to negate people who had a vested interest in ranking well i.e. businesses. Lets face it Mr and Mrs Smith were not going to pay an SEO expert to optimise their family website, businesses would, did and do. The best way of removing this “problem” is to make on the page SEO almost useless. Of course the basics are still there but anybody can do these, the truth is that if you’ve read the free resources that are openly available and implemented that advice then there is very little an SEO expert can do to your on-page factors that will have much influence with Google. At the same time Google liked to put forward the notion that “content is king”, remember this for later.
The next big victim in Google’s attempt to remove business was reciprocal linking. Getting links was vital to ranking well in Google’s new world, obviously the people with the most to gain for ranking well could employ SEO experts to manage link building campaigns. Swapping links was a big industry not so long ago. What was Google’s solution to this problem, devalue reciprocal links, make them worthless, emphasise the importance of one way links and re-iterate that “content is king”.
So comes the next step in the campaign. As soon as Google mentioned one way links then a certain class of website had a problem, the business website of course. How could a business website attract one way links? When your website comprises of fairly static who you are, what you sell and some recommendations or even worse several hundred products, a shopping cart and some basic contact information how do you get people to link to you? The simple answer is you pay them. It’s a tactic I’ve used for clients and still do, the simple reason is…NOT PAGE RANK, but customers. My clients want customers, customers come from visitors. You’ll notice that in my TLA experiment I didn’t bother mentioning page rank or search results, my results were based on visitor statistics. Google’s determination to kick sites selling links is going to have a major affect on a lot of websites. Forget link love, juice or whatever you want to call it, when those sites selling links get fewer visitors then so do you. Not only does buying links no longer boost your own search popularity but you are now almost guaranteed to get less traffic from a bought link. This leaves people looking to run business websites with very few options. Perhaps the best one is to buy their ranking in Google with a sponsored result? A sponsored result where all Google’s rules go out the window. Who’d have guessed!
Content is king, well here’s some news for you, a lot of the searches on the internet are by people not looking for “content” in the form of 350-500 words as such, but just looking to buy something. How long is it going to be until you search for “Sony Digital Camera” and Google’s natural results are dominated by blogs spewing crap about Sony Cameras? Want to buy a camera, look for the sponsored links at the top and right. If you want to rank well write a blog, forget static content, shopping carts, fancy interactive features, and just spew out nonsense in a blog! Don’t believe me? It’s the exact tactic I used on my own business. There were phrases I wanted to rank for so I optimised my actual business site to within an inch of its life with little affect on Google. I started a blog in a subdirectory with the odd casual mention of the phrases I was targeting. Within a month I (my Blog) was placed in the top 3 for every phrase in Google’s results. The problem was converting these visitors into customers; obviously they were looking for a website that was centred on selling what they were looking for and not a blog. It worked for me because I could shape that traffic to where I wanted it with some clever internal linking. It’s a crazy situation and one entirely manufactured by Google. So I’m a detective Agency based in New York, I want people looking to hire a detective to be able to find me so how do I do it. Whatever you do don’t try a business website selling your services unless you want to pay Google, if you want your visitors for free start a blog about Being A Private Detective In New York and just hope that your visitors will dig deep enough to find what you’re selling.
There are the exceptions to the rule, the big shops that have lucrative advertising deals with Google will always feature as will those that have been around since the year dot. As Google remove more and more of the factors that they take into account when ranking, punish people for promoting their businesses then their results are going to become dominated by text filled nonsense websites. In the last 2 years Google had the balance just about right, if I wanted to find John Chow’s website I did a search for John Chow, there is a nice mix of business and private websites amongst most search results. I can’t see that lasting much longer.
If this all sounds a bit doom and gloom it’s because I’m sick of reading and hearing about Google. If they could just be honest (they have shareholders to answer to and are just running a business at the end of the day) then I’m sure we’d all adjust, but with all the bull shit about “best search results” and doing no evil it’s just plain annoying. In fact it’s almost enough to make me turn to Yahoo, almost!
) 