Slashdot Mirror
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."
Google's AdWords program is remarkable in that truly anyone can buy ads. Small businesses with tiny marketing budgets can buy ads easily. Individuals can buy ads. The interface is simple and easy to use. Google even has a bunch of small business friendly features like limiting your cost per ad and total daily ad spend.
I've bought a bunch of ads on Google, most recently for my startup, Findory News. Most web advertising is expensive, difficult to set up, and performs poorly. But, because you can pick such specific keywords with Google Adwords and the advertising engine refuses to show ads that don't perform well, you can easily get in front of people that might be interested in them.
...to cyberspace. So go ahead businesses, pay tribute to your new Google overlords.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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
it's true and i can prove it -- we dont use google adwords, and we're going absolutely horrible! XD
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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".
Helpful Tip:
I use Google Alert for my personal site. I use it to track when other pages link to my site.
Per their About page:
With Google Alert, you can automatically keep track of anything on the web! Google Alert is the web's leading automated search and web intelligence solution. It runs daily Google searches for you and emails you when new results appear. Many people use Google Alert to keep track of what the web is saying about them, their interests or projects they are involved in. You can use Google Alert to keep track of any time someone mentions your name on the web. You can also track mentions of your website, your place of work, or your favorite hobby or celebrity -- the uses are limited only by your imagination. Click here for some great search ideas and some useful tips. The Frequently Asked Questions provide more detailed information about Google Alert. Selected as BBC's Website of the Day and USA Today's Hot Site, the free Google Alert service enables people in over 120 countries to stay up to date with their interests. Users include journalists, marketers, IT professionals, lawyers, doctors, salespeople, educators, researchers, and government employees. Click to start using Google Alert right away - it's easy and free!
My Tech Posts on Twitter
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.
..that the add that came up (for me) on this article was an add for Google AdWords. After what happened to the fractal website recently, maybe this is the start of a war: Slashdot now knows that Google too has the power to slashdot. That would truly be the war of the Two (server) Towers: Google googling Slashdot; Slashdot slashdotting Google. Oh, the humanity!
are URLs that look like this:
Of course said page contains ads for something else or is just a redirect/popup trap.
Google really needs to use their mad skillz to counteract this. Their algorithm is being screwed by the same type of people who brought us BonziBuddy and all that other worthless shit on the web.
They came up with the best search engine - I'm sure they can stay on top. But I wonder if they've even noticed, given the massive amount of data they must deal with.
If you want to spend money on better placement, send it to the people who are providing the service -- Google -- and buy up ads.
I've paid for ads on google to try it out, and was pretty damned pleased.
The process was simple - you tell it what words to bring up your ad, how specific like "games" versus "pc games" versus "first person shooter pc games". The more generic, the greather the chance of getting clicked, but the greater the cost. The ad is unobtrusive - just a text link (not a gigantic banner that will offend everybody else).
You can specify how many ads to pay for in advance. So if you only have enough money for 1000 clicks, it stops at 1000 - and you can either renew, or just leave it be.
Overall, it's just simple. The article mentions the bed and breakfast "Honeymoon Haven" or whatever that was worried about the service - I'd tell her not to be worried at all.
And I think that's why Google is doing the best so far: it's simple. No huge Yahoo like directories that make little sense, or extra ads cluttering the way. It gives me what I want, and if I want more, I click on it.
Perfect? No - some sites are optimizing themselvers to annoyance, like entering "'resident evil' walkthrough" and getting in the top 10 links annoying search engines or porn sites adding words and linking to each other to build up their Google score. But for 90% of the time, it's "good enough".
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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.
--
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.
It seems that Google is also less concerned with search quality then before -- just compare their quailty with some of the newer, less heard of, engines. This leads me to conclude that Google's putting their efforts primarily into approaches where they see very large margins, such as content-based (adsense) advertisements.
(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.)
I love google... It is my home page in my browser. I use it 100 times a day. But sometimes the results don't cut it, or seem to be in a different direction than what I am looking for.
Does anyone have recommendations to some good alternative engines? I used to use altavista, askjeeves, hotbot... but I don't remember the last time I got really useful results from them (maybe cuz I haven't used them for a couple years). What about those apps that you can download that search numerous engines?
It is interesting (scary?) to see how much a business can be affected by the algorithms and voodoo of an entity such as google. What I find about myself as well, is that if I am looking for a store or business that provides a certain good or service, I always go to google (or mytelus, gag...) to search for it. I don't think I even go to any sort of specialty shops or businesses anymore unless I have found that they have a web site that doesn't repulse me. Anyone else find themselves falling into these sorts of habits?
java guy, tech blog...
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
I wouldn't even venture a guess as to the amount of web content that Google doesn't display, given its limitations.
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
There's obviously been an arms race developing for a long time between the people running queries and the people with sites that might be returned by queries. Has anyone thought about what the likely endgame is? To me it seems possible that good impartial search engines are just doomed. How can you write algorithms that automatically read pages and determine their relevance to particular subjects in the face of web-page creators who will do anything to get ranked highly?
And it's not enough for your ranking method to be a little bit obscure or hard-to-understand; any search engine now has to face the prospect that the economy is capable of supporting smart poeple to work full time on figuring out how to break your ranking algorithm.
It's not hard to imagine a future where any search engine is either manually maintained (like the various web directories) or completely advertiser-run.
--Bruce Fields
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.
Lookie what I got when I searched for Litigious bastards
Here is a paper describing my exchange with Overture on this issue. Summary of paper:
Since then I have determined by researching one of my own pay-per-click keywords is that Overture will filter out a client that has a cookie if it clicks more than once every 30 minutes.
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?
I know it's just an idiom but I think it's fair to say a Google can help a business "make" it but it doesn't "break" it. The article is all about how fortunate you can be if you have top rank in Google but Google in no way is obligated to help anyone nor does it actually break anybody.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Leave litigious out of it, and look what you get.
Aside from shopping sites and very random, hard to find things, I don't see where Google is so important when it comes to being broken.
Most businesses seem to use the web as an extension of their brick and mortar business. It's a place you visit when you need extended information on a company or a quick way to communicate with a corporate office.
Simply putting your site on your next batch of business cards will probably produce more relevant visits to your site than having every person who typed a word that happens to match with your advertising scheme with Google.
For instance, if I am going to do research on window curtains, I will probably hit up a few big brick and mortar store's websites, then go check out the products in person. Since the big corporations seem to be the only people running stores these days, it would seem that most people would know what is in their area without the assistance of the web (except for driving directions). Most folks would know Linens 'n Things, Bed Bath 'n Beyond, Riches, Target, Walmart, etc have such items and would not need to do a blanket search on Google for 'window curtains'.
Personally, when I do a search and see where a company obviously paid for their search location, I will rarely visit. I tend to assume they are just concerned about getting a bunch of hits for banners and redirection to sites I would have already visited on my own.
I know it's important to some web-only, small companies without a well-known name. But this is not something I would consider 'make or break' on a wide scale. It sounds more like a case of a small minority making a majority of noise over something they do not think is fair.
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.
Joe Computer #1: Hey, how do i get to my search engine?
Joe Computer #2: Just look it up on google.
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.
There's a catch-phrase that would get you in my circular file real quick.
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.
An interesting point being brought up by responses on this thread is the informational Google versus the business/products Google. We have 2 scenarios:
- Searching for "Apple" while looking for information about the company, who is on the board, company history.
- Searching for "Apple" while looking for an iPod.
This is an extremely bad example, but the point is I think the problem that Google is running into is that the line between information or selling products is becoming too fuzzy. But I would say that both searches are "legitimate". In the least, the blurring of this line only serves to dilute the search results.
Maybe a solution would be to move all product/purchase type searches to Froogle and have Google return ONLY informational sites instead of sites that sell products (which seems inline with their original intent).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
and in a new twist, the latest version of the google toolbar returns results with the page one results being filled with nothing but ads related to the search. you have to go to page 2 for the standard results.
The solution's simple -- switch to Mozilla and install the Googlebar -- it contains even more functionality than Google's official toolbar for IE and returns results as though you'd searched from Google's main page.
Or, if you don't want to switch browsers, you can install the Google Deskbar, which allows you to search even without a browser window.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
That was just a subtle way of calling "BULLSHIT!" on the parent post. Hence, ontopic. And insightful.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
It is funny that Google has a near monopoly based on a superior product and the ppl who are complaining typically use MS which is a company that has aquire a monopoly through illegal means. MS has actually destroyed far more companies just with a single update than Google has.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Take a look at this usenet thread where someone describes a similar problem. In this case, it appears that the person was infected with the "QHosts Trojan". Message #3 in the thread gives some links.
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
And I'm ranked just above WinDrivers.com on the first page.
I didn't pay for that. I just have a massive collection of drivers. My site consumes an 80GB harddrive and about 50% of that is drivers.
WinDrivers.com used to charge $50 a year for access to their collection which I remember because I thought it was so outragous. Now they charge $29.95 a year. Which is 5 cents less than I charge. However they still charge $5 for a day pass where I charge $1.
If you're looking for a specific file that Windows told you're missing and you type it in Google, my site will be top ranked if I have it. Sites like WinDrivers.com tend to ZIP up their files. I let them all hang out.
I'm also highly ranked on DirectX related things because I have practically every version of the SDK. And likewise, all the files are available indiviually. So looking for a specific file will result in my site comming up.
It's content that gets a site ranked high as well as the domain name, file name, and directory name.
I'm currently in the process of revamping the site which will probably kill me on Google for a bit as it reindexes everything but that doesn't take long.
You don't need to pay $5000 to get highly ranked. You just need some sense and a well designed web-site with stuff people would be looking for.
Slashdot isn't bad advertising either. Recycled Russian Brides was probably the most effective sig ad. I had a front page story once and a number of times I've written articles which have been posted on a major game development web-site. Free advertising in exchange for making something useful.
Ben
Work Safe Porn