Companies Getting Frustrated With The Power Of Search
from the but-they-can't-find-me! dept
Being highly ranked in search results is a crucial metric for many businesses. While quite often this can evoke the idea of shady companies built on little more than some search-engine optimization, it creates some hefty issues for more legitimate companies as well. Decisions such as name changes or shifts from .net to .com domains are being influenced by how they'll effect search results, with many companies frustrated with the feeling of being held ransom by their Google rank or other factors. This frustration grows when search companies aren't particularly helpful to businesses making legitimate changes, preferring to let their algorithms, which often ignore certain kinds of behavior because they signal fraud or other funny business, handle everything. While it's certainly well within the rights of a company like Google to tinker with its algorithm, it and other search engines' vast amount of influence over sites' traffic and business could make many people feel they have some responsibility to make things a little easier for the legitimate companies that aren't looking to scam the system. Of course, that's a very fine line: when does optimizing a site to make it easier for search engines to crawl it crossover into the realm of manipulation? And if a business is built around monetizing traffic from search, does that make it less legitimate than a company in some other, more generally accepted line of work?
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more transparency
In the end if google believes that it needs to keep it's algorithms secret for competitive reasons or as a security measure against seo hackers, which are legitimate, I think.. I don't know how much things can change. Maybe if one or more legitimate competitors in the search space arise, there'd be at little more diversification of SEO risk.
I talk a little about it here Google algorithms, security by obscurity?.
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Can't do it short term
But if you need to make changes, or there's a name change, you do the best you can and try to be what a searcher would be looking for. There wil be ups and downs, but if you don't watch the results daily, you can relax and ride an upward trend.
If you concentrate on being a resource a searcher would want, then as search engines improve, so will (in general) your rankings.
It's not easy to ignore precipitous changes, but they aren't really your results in the first place, so you shouldn't be dependent on them.
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Companies pay to be on prime time spots in television, for ad space in publications, and for prime retail space in stores. They strive for "earned media" with public relations.
All of this is translated to the web. SEO is organic search, and there are paid search options as well.
The search engines can create any algorithm they want. They are a business like any other. They set it up to make a profit. If other people come in and capitalize on it - they can only do so b/c that's what people want. Ultimately, people have to buy what's being sold on the internet for all of this to work.
If you engage in a business that is so heavily dependent on another company (in this case a search engine) - then name or extension changes and changing algorithms are part of the risk.
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Combine that with the difficulty of maintaining a high ranking, and you have a major problem.
Businesses must have much broader marketing to thrive.
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times change
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With Money..
Nothing to see here, move along...
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Let the market sort it out
The best Google can do is keep their algorithms secret; there is no way they can vet every search term, much less be equitable about it.
Big companies should spend the money to optimize and advertise. It's not that hard to optimize, and I know what Marketing spends their money on. A few Google ads certainly won't hurt them.
I don't want to see corporate ad sites listed when I'm looking for information. I'm not that sympathetic to them anyway.
Maybe Google could make some more $$$ by offering a business search area that only allows vetted (paying) businesses to participate, perhaps by the phrase.
Bottom line, public awareness and government non- interference will allow all these sorts of problems to work themselves out.
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Google is FREE, Yahoo is FREE
Yahoo and MSN and ASK are also FREE.
Webmasters have the option of BUYING ads if they do not like being dependant on Organic listings.
They can also buy Directory listings.
The article in question does not point out that companies change their domains by choice -no one if forcing them to.
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Google is FREE, Yahoo is FREE
Whether they feel that they are being held ransom is not the point. Google is providing a FREE SERVCICE and a FREE SOURCE of INCOME - you make a choice to optimize to get higher!!!!!!
Yahoo and MSN and ASK are also FREE.
Webmasters have the option of BUYING ads if they do not like being dependant on Organic listings.
They can also buy Directory listings.
The article in question does not point out that companies change their domains by choice -no one if forcing them to.
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name change
A more advanced version of the algorithm could detect when a page has been flagged as moved, record this, and only allow you to use the page moved feature twice in 18 months, or some otehr limited number of times, to prevent link farmers using it.
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The concerns are legitimate and we're taking them
I work on Google's Search Quality team, and so of course I (and probably tons of others) have been following all the conversations on this topic.
Lots of good points have been made on all sides. Having one-on-one conversations with Webmasters on all issues is, pretty obviously, not scalable. But on the flip side, Webmasters understandably often have legitimate and compelling concerns that warrant information, attention, and solutions.
The bottom line is that Webmasters should check out our Webmaster Central at http://www.google.com/webmasters. Extensive help docs in 18 languages, a blog just about Webmaster issues (and we just started a German version today, more languages to come) which includes comments, and an active forum.
Of equal interest, we've been pretty rapidly introducing new tools as part of our commitment to Webmasters, including:
- an interactive robots.txt checker
- crawl diagnostics
- detailed backlinks and anchor text info
- PageRank details
and a lot more.
Our team that is dedicated to Webmaster concerns is growing, and it's international in scope.
I'm proud that we're becoming more transparent. We'll still keep some things close to our chest to stave off blatant manipulation of search results or other user-unfriendly behavior and so on. But we'll be continuing to share more and more info with Webmasters and other Google users over time.
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