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How Google Can Make or Break A Small Business
securitas writes "USA Today's Jefferson Graham reports on how Google affects small business through its rankings and text ads. The feature describes how the fortunes of small companies turned when their Google ranking rose or dropped, as well as the effects of Google's paid search text advertising model. Search Engine Watch says that Google now performs an estimated 80% of the searches (200 million) on the Internet every day. The result is that Google has become a critical part of any online marketing strategy and has spawned a whole Google-optimization industry where consultants can charge $5,000 per site for tweaking. The feature is light on technical details but the stories of those who prospered and suffered due to Google make a good read."
Why blame google when you can blame yourself? If you can't compete, start looking for other jobs.
Go Google!
If you rely on another business so much that it can make or break you, it's time to find a new business model. It's not Google's responsibility to send traffic to your site, and I'm sick of people complaining about Google being unfair as if there's some magic entitlement to good rankings.
I bet an article on "roll forming" would have worked just as well. If someone wants to find a SOAP client for GForge,
typing "gforge soap client" into Google puts you where it should - right here.
Seems like this is being made a bit more complicated than necessary....
The Army reading list
I'm sure it'll be said here more than once this discussion but the fact of the matter is that if the life of your business depends on your Google ranking I would say "Don't be annoyed when it drops and breaks you: be thankful that it was up there in the first place, giving a chance to a business that obviously has no other hope".
Here we have another example of the danger of focusing on one entity to provide a product or service. Microsoft has the same issue. One security hole in IE can create all sorts of problems for the majority of the population.
Similarly, people have focused on Google as a search engine (for similar reasons - it is "user-friendly") and as a a result we are beginning to see the problems inherent in this approach.I have two eyes, I have two feet.
This study documents how Google can make a small business. And obviously a large business needs Google placement, to handle its scale of commerce. But how does a lackluster Google result break a small business? If your bizplan requires high Google placement, given the inherent, unmitigable risk in being ranked by another company. you've got a really risky bizplan. That is what is breaking your small business, not Google itself.
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make install -not war
I have seen this first hand.... but to blame google is wrong.
The problem is these businesses chose to depend on google and only google for their web hits...all their marketing eggs in one basket, so to speak.
(Ok, technically their business is to sell as many AdWords as possible, but they do this by being the no. 1 search engine, and they are that because they provide the best search experience for the user.)
In the information age with transportation systems as they are, ideally there should be increased "economies of scale" and business should move to those who provide the best value (whatever combination of cheap, service, support, quality and product is optimal), and the huge massive amount of duplication of effort will be eliminated.
Unfortunately that *entirely* rests on consumers making educated choices and migrating to a small subset of "best of breed" service/product providers.
The fact that they aren't, and that Google rankings and adwords has this effect - is entirely due to the fact that consumers are stupid.
Don't blame Google. Blame stupid consumers.
I love google. I use it every day. It is an oracle and a home for all of human knowledge. The greatest archive in history. Period.
However, all of this is only owned by one company.
Does anyone else see the danger here? 80% of the internet uses google for searches. Think about this. 80% of people use the same service owned by the same people.
I am wary.
Luckily, google has a track history of being a fantastic and fairly honest company. But how long until someone that works there becomes too greedy.
There is a serious danger in having so much power centralized to one service. I commend google for creating the greatest source of knowledge in human history.
I just worry that, maybe, we'd be better off if we had some more options, in case google turned sour.
Surly SOMEONE can compete with google.
no
Exactly. Or even better, do the one thing that is almost garenteed to get you better placement:
provide meaningfull content which deserves to be ranked highly in a search. If your site is the best source of information about foo, then more people will know that you sell foo, and will trust that you know what you are doing.
It seems hard for a small buisness to fight for a good page rank with all those scripted sites flooding Google with irrelevant Linkexchange or other sites that get you nowhere near your desired information. This is especially true since Google gives those pages a higher rank that contain the keyword in the url (hence all the blabla?cheap+shoe+store) links).
Judging from my personal impression Google has become less useful lately...
just my 2cents
Google is popular because it works.
It seems to give good results, and seems reasonably fair.
The paid links are clearly identified.
If google started being unethical, or giving bad hits it would be less valuable.
Their only competative advantage is accurate results, they must keep it.
If you are reffering with 'sleeze bags' to the 'consultants' mentioned in the post I disagree.
You can consult buisnesses to do some adjustements that makes it easier for google spiders to spider your site.
For instance : dropping frames, change your 'get'-url's to 'normal' urls, providing metadata, making sure your site gets linked a lot, providing text alternatives for grafic buttons etc...
Stuff that a good webdeveloper should implement, but there are a lot of bad webdevelopers/sites out there.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
The feature describes how the fortunes of small companies turned when their Google ranking rose or dropped.... [which has] spawned a whole Google-optimization industry where consultants can charge $5,000 per site for tweaking....
Fungible is defined as "[r]eturnable or negotiable in kind or by substitution, as a quantity of grain for an equal amount of the same kind of grain". In other words, it means "interchangeable".
Apparently the information on these web sites is fungible: Google can substitute one business for another, and as far as Google is concerned, the result is the same.
This is not to say that the businesses necessarily offer products that are fungible; but apparently, for certain obvious searches about those products, the sites return essentially the same information. And it's that information -- not the products -- that Google "sells".
So each competing business offers essentially the same information as far as Google is concerned. These businesses then hire consultants to multiply the number of other sites linking to their version of that fungible information, in hopes that Google will see the links and consider their web site the more authoritative and thus higher paged-ranked source for the fungible information.
The problem is that the information is fungible. rather than try to multiply the links to the same old information, differentiate your site by offering different information.
One easy way to offer different information is to offer a different (and presumably but not necessarily lower) price. Or --egads! -- differentiate your site by offering a better product. Or a bundle product.
Or even better, give Google what it wants: diverse information. Write an article about your product or service that addresses a need your customers have. Offer it for free, and attract people to your site. If Ace Hardware offers free e-books on hoe to make home repairs, Google will index it, and I'll, end up there. and maybe I'll stay and buy, rather than go back to Google and find competitor Home depot.
Or give away free instructions for making paper models of your product, like Yamaha does with its motorcycles. That got Yamaha featured on Slashdot -- and for free. Put up a whitepaper -- not the usual crap whitepapers that come down to "the only solution is our product, and by god it's a vague solution" -- but a real whitepaper of real use to professionals in your industry.
Sponsor an open-source project that use or features or facilitates the use of, your product. and then sponsor that project's web space, on your server next to your site.
We could come up with example after example, but the take home point is this: if the information you offer is fungible, expect sooner or later someone else will win the page rank lottery and outrank you. So make sure you offer something unique and uniquely useful.
That'll be $5000.00, please.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Yeah, the spam problem is not as bad on Slashdot. But you see it in some (more subtle) forms. Links in peoples sigs and posts, referrer links, etc.
The moderation system makes outright spamming a lost cause.
Also, I think Slashcode has some safeguards that have been put in after many attempts to crapflood. They managed to stop those GNAA losers when they went on a crapflooding binge (which worked for a while).
Why are you just thinking about it? Adwords are so cheap that for a business dropping $300 or whatever into an advertising test should reveal very quickly how successful it will be. $300 is nothing to risk compared to the money you could make if it works. And if it's true that people who visit your site become customers, you could make a bunch of money even with $300 in ads on Google.
Forgive me, but everyone loves a winner. You can't be a winner unless you're going to take a chance with a minor amount of money. If I were your boss, I'd direct you to put the ad up, and I'd want to see it there by the end of the day.
--Guns don't kill people, abortion clinics kill people.
You see that link at the bottom of each search?
"Help us improve"
Click it. Then paste that URL in there (NOT as one that you were looking for, but in the comment box) and mention how it's just irrelevant crap.
PhD's vs. spammers. The spammers aren't be *that* bright, even if they are persistant.
Um, pardon me, but what are you talking about? I have the latest version of the Google toolbar (2.0.106) and am not seeing behavior anything like what you are suggesting.
If you are serious (and not just trying to flame Google), perhaps you actually have some kind of spyware resident on your system?
Yeah. Somebody wrote a script that uses Mod-rewrite to use the Amazon Web services product feed and create an individual html page for every item that Amazon sells. So anybody can throw up the amazon script and mod-rewrite hack on a web server and they instantly have thousands of "pages" that Google indexes, which are nothing more than associate comission links to Amazon pages. I've noticed these kinds of pages nudging their way into the top 10 for a while now.
Why is it that on occasion that the top 10 to 50 "hits" all show urls with different domain names but they all point to the same website? Why is it that there are so many fake search engines that get top spots on Google - many times with totally random words. I am starting to get tired of Google allowing this sort of gaming. Now, I just need to find a suitable replacement ....
For those of you too young to remember the days before Google, there were other search engines, such as Altavista (the first big one) and Yahoo. The reason Google became the most popular is that they do a very good job of ranking the interesting items first, which is important when there are 39000 hits for your query. The Search Engine Promotion business, when it's not just a scam sold by spammers, is mainly about doing artificial things to make Google's robots think your page would be interesting to humans; it's much better to _actually_ make your page interesting to actual humans, and hope Google's robots pick up on that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I must be one of the few people who rarely click on the paid advertising links on the right side of the search results. When I do click on them, I have found they often lead to questionable type web sites who I wouldn't want to give my credit card number to.
- Waiting 20 seconds before submitting something.
- Waiting 2 minutes between submits.
Spammers can't be productive in that kind of environment.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
have a very relevant website that lots of people visit and link to.
I run a health related website that is #2 for a single keyword and I've not spent a penny, but I have spent years being a valuable resource to the people who have an interest in the subject matter.
The key, I'll say it again, is relevance.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
We were listed as the top or one of the top companies for a few keywords that we specialize in, and recently Google's new shift in indexing has plummeted us to an unknown location for ALL of the keywords we used to get top rankings for.
When 80-90% of our business comes from clients who found us on Google, we're scrambling to figure out how to get that top listing again. It's the difference between our small 5 person company thirving or dying, and that's not just speculation, it's the way of our life.
The question on a lot of small businesses's mind who are in the same predicament is most likely: "What went wrong?"
I'm not directly blaming Google, there were most likely steps that we could have taken, but Google is literally like hacking a black box. Right when you think you may have figured out how things work, it all dances around on the insides and changes the game again.
If your business model is predicated on being a top ranked site on a search engine, fold tents and go home now, before you waste any more money.
It's almost as crappy a model as the one based on having a domain name you think everyone will type in.
I am pretty sure that redirecting users to msn search when they typed google to the address bar would get Microsoft in deep shit and lead to another round of antitrust lawsuits with absolute and damning evidence that they acted with the sole intent to manipulate the marketplace, possibly even resulting in a court order to remove IE from windows entirely or shutting down search.msn
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Saying Google is too powerful and should be forced to carry politically correct content is somewhat like saying CNN is too powerful and should be forced to carry politically correct news, except that the Internet has far fewer limitations on capacity than cable TV and has a much lower cost for getting into the business. It's not only Wrong, but it would degrade the quality of the site, and people would go leave. By contrast, if you offer a competing channel (like Fox News or PBS or politically-correct-search-engine.gov), then people can make a choice between your favorite site and their current one.
Also, while the Search Engine Watch site says 80% of searches are Google, I've recently seen some discussion that Google is about 30-40% of the market, Yahoo's pretty close, and there are some others out there with non-trivial readership levels.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks