Here’s the hard reality - at least ONE of your top-ranked sites will eventually suffer either through a hand-job or because of some quirk in the algorithm. You WILL get screwed over by Google and your rankings WILL drop. It’s how the game goes - if you cannot control 100% of your ranking factors (and you cannot), then you are not 100% safe. There is ALWAYS a risk with Google or with any other vehicle that you depend on to earn your livelihood.
15 Comments
15 Comments
Comments
Indeed, the Emperor’s new clothes look fine today, as you said.
No I won’t shut up because it’s accepting Google’s BS that got us all here in the first place. Google has become a juggernaut and it’s increasingly more difficult to decrease dependency as the article suggests. Like Spiderman’s uncle told him, with great power comes great responsibility and if Google isn’t responsible with it’s power, people MUST call them on it. I’m actually encouraged by all the "bashing" that I’ve been seeing from bigger and bigger names. Maybe they’ll eventually listen.
Oh dear, what’s next - "Will the Google Bashers Please Stand Up?" All in one neat line, facing the firing squad? Yes, whining will get us nowhere. But then - who is actually "whining"? I’ve always agreed with John Andrews that there’s no point in projecting anything on Google - but that includes the "good" with the "bad". As that old white hat adage has it: "Stick scrupulously to the search engines’ guidelines, stay ethical, build top notch content - lose your rankings anyway." More fun (and a whole lot more of an intellectual challenge) to spam them to oblivion, I would say. :)
I’ve actually been very interested to read the warnings and experiences of people like Aaron. I think what they are saying is worth reading, and wouldn’t like them to be silent if they genuinely feel Google is dishonest and hypocritical. It seems to me like this would be important information for any SEO to have, if it’s true. And even if it’s only opinion, it makes for more diverse reading. I appreciate Ahmed’s request that people not whine, but if what you are hearing is a genuine complaint, it’s unfair to call it whining, isn’t it? Maybe these folks who are saying, "hey, listen up" have something important to say. My 2 cents.
Personally I am very critical of Google because of its PPC behavior. The way Google implements Adwords PPC changes, and its lack of communication or transparency with its paying advertisers is APPALLING. I know several people who have lost entire businesses and had to rebuild from scratch because of this. And they were spending over $100k/month. (I’m not talking about arbitragers or other spammy type practices - I’m talking real businesses with real products and real employees.)
John’s article was in my opinion at least 5x better than the Performancing article
C’mon who’s going to do Chris Crocker style Britney Spears video crying for Google ... think of the link love people
"C’mon who’s going to do Chris Crocker style Britney Spears video crying for Google" Nah I’ll link to a "Googlers.. you bastards! Leave the poor SEOs alone" video; just point the camera at yourself and say: "and how fucking dare Googlers make fun of SEOs after all they’ve been through! Their sites lost rankings, their sites got banned, they got their AdSense accounts canned, their 7 year old sites are stuck in -950-land, and now Googlers won’t even answer their reinclusion requests. All you Googlers care about are search results page views and AdWords clicks and making money off of SEOs’ content! SEOs are humans!! *sob* What you don’t realize is that SEOs’ MFA sites are making you all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about how paid links pollute search results! SEOs haven’t made decent money in years. Their song is gimme more for a reason because all Google wants is MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!! Leave them alone! You’re lucky SEOs even publish content for you BASTARDS!! LEAVE SEOs ALONE! *cry*"
Loving the video cry suggestion, volunteers with squeaky voices form an orderly queue, Halfdeck has already done the hard part ;)
Google brought it onto themselves. They created a holier-than-thou culture/code-of-conduct ("Don’t be evil"), created a whole set of guidelines, and then ignored or worked against everything they stand for. Some cases in point: 1. Cloaking in the SERPs is allowed for science publishers and NYT but not us. 2. AdWords and AdSense: absolutely no transparency. "Trust us" is not enough in a business relationship (Y! and AdCenter need to spot this differntiating opportunity). Simple question: what’s the revenue share percentage? AFAIK, it’s not publicly available. 3. The health care blog fiasco is another symptom of what’s going on. 4. Finally, they call it personalization, but it’s closer to the classic definition of spyware (watch the user to show them ads) than the whiter-than-white marketing they give it. Google is nothing but a brand, and us Google-bashers see it for what it is: a search engine and a company. Once you disconnect the brand from functionality, you’ll see a much scarier picture. So no, I for one won’t shut up. Pierre One recent public example is Seth Godin’s reality check: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/the-haystack.html .
There are two very distinct groups of ’Google Bashers’: 1. Those who once were ’believers’ in some mystical mythical ’good for all’ Google entity. The anguish underlying the vitriol indicates the depth of betrayal felt from an abrupt change of perception. I consider bashing from these folks as therapeutic. They have my sympathy and I truly hope they find a more realistic peaceful equilibrium soon. As with most sidewalk orators I quickly pass them on by: one more noise source on a dinn filled internet street. 2. Those who see and explore an apparent disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of Google the for-profit corporation. When Google says, offers, or does something whether officially, i.e. product or press release, or unofficially, i.e. Matt Cutts blog, it benefits me, us, to determine why. What does ’it’ do for them? Where does ’it’ fit with prior behaviours, patents, papers, and comments? What, who, and how are they presenting and discussing ’it’? What potential impact will ’it’ have on me, on others? What responses do I have to ’it’, with what likely consequences? These ’bashers’ add alternate perception value to our individual knowledge of Google. To know that while the water is fine the kool-aid is not. To consider the value of an application to Google beyond its usefulness to me, us. To know that Google discriminates between large and small, weak and powerful, service partners and not. To understand that Google is an ad server that uses a search engine to market its product. To see Google clearly now. Not all bashes aimed at Google are accurate or even true. Welcome to the WWW. Welcome to BloggartLand. Where genuine artifical so-true factoids are available in a rainbow of opinion-rated colours, absolutely free, including complimentary personalised advertisements, in return for your priceless, i.e. valueless, private data. Thank you. Remember: sharing is what Web 2.0 is all about. Don’t be an antiquated Web 1.0 dinosaur with your silly privacy buried in the sand. You all share, we monetise, it’s a great new world. Hurrah for the Bashers, one and all.
It is well worth the time to examine and even deconstruct the Google brand. They have been masters at creating a public perception via the ’Do No Evil’ credo, and for the average user of the Internet, this is believed with a near-mania. When a company has this kind of image, it gives them a lot of goodwill to play with. More than that, for a company like Google, most users of their service will have no clue what is really going on. The whole idea of a search engine is almost mysterious to many, regardless of profession or education. I like to use my mother as an example -- she’s the CTO of a chemical company, and she is amazed when I tell her about things like data collection, privacy, and how data gets reused. This isn’t someone who is tech-illiterate, just as the rabid anti-SEO crowd at Digg isn’t tech-illiterate. When I look at Google and Google’s brand, I feel a sense of concern about the lack of transparency in many of their business operations, and a sense of concern about how they attempt to dictate the business models of others. Because of market power, they can even succeed in many aspects of that dictation. Their market power also creates barriers to market entry for competitors. Frankly, I think Google is going rapidly towards a state of anti-trust, but I don’t know that the current regulatory environment is going to care.
@betweenstations: You said, "Frankly, I think Google is going rapidly towards a state of anti-trust, but I don’t know that the current regulatory environment is going to care." Exactly. And exactly. These last three and four comments, yours included, have clearly and impressively outlined exactly why we must continue to speak out. But your final summary, as just quoted, hits the two nails on the head. They ARE headed for antitrust; might be there already. And the regulatory environment is not going to care because they are hypnotized by the Pied Piper’s (Google’s) music of free stuff (that is indeed good stuff.) So our voices seek to 1. identify the antitrust and 2. alert the regulatory powers that be of the dualistic implications of a Googagenda. Well said, all. @mbeharry: If you are the King of Google Bashing, we kneel before you and await our orders...
To all followers of the King of Google Bashing, here are his orders: 1. You must install user-agent:googlebot disallow:/ on all of your domains. Stop the evil Goolge empire from scraping and stealing your content. If you refuse to do this, you will be hunted down like dogs by the minions of the King and be labeled forever a Google-loving hypocrite. 2. You must redirect all traffic with google.com in the referer string to mtv.com. Do not let Google’s evil, poisonous traffic corrupt your website. If every Google user clicks on a search result and get redirected to an irrelevant result, they will be pissed, use Yahoo or Ask instead, and Google will lose marketshare. If we all unite in this effort, Google will go down in flames, and we can finally live in peace.
I have come to the conclusion that what some may perceive as intentional evil is actually just shortsightedness. Google’s goal (and the goal of almost all publicly traded companies) is maximum profits in the short term. In the business world, that means giving the largest advertisers what they want. Nothing more; nothing less. What they cannot see that some "Google bashers" are screaming about is that Google’s focus is strangling the Golden Goose. Their use of neural nets based on flawed logic is undermining their proclamations and overriding advertisers’ intentions. I suspect that Google believes that what is good for the largest advertisers is good for everyone and THAT is a huge error. Most market research is done on Fortune 500 companies and all their research will reflect that bias. Unless you’re a huge company that is a household name, be sure you know what game you’re playing before you hit the field, and be aware that the rules and what works constantly changes. After testing it myself and discussing it with the most brilliant PPC people I know, I now recommend mass deleting all broad match keywords in every AdWords account. Any one you leave will continue to zap your results. If we could just get everyone to focus on the summit and not on the ditches the world would be a far better place and everyone would be vastly happier. Check out Kevin Kelly’s many sites including http://www.longnow.org/ to learn more.