Businesses Scramble To Stay Out of Google Hell

whoever57 writes "Forbes has up an article on the consequences of being dumped into a claimed 'supplemental index', also known as 'Google Hell'. It uses the example of Skyfacet, a site selling diamonds rings and other jewelery, which has dropped in Google's rankings and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the site owner paid a marketing consultant to improve the sites. The article claims that sites in the supposed 'supplemental index' may be visited by Google's spiders as infrequently as once per year. The problem? Google's cache shows that Google's spiders visited the site ss recently as late April. 'Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.'"

Comments

New Business Model

[MyLongNickName]

1) Go into business
2) Gather home pages of major competitors
3) Add links to these home pages on disreputable web sites
4) Watch their traffic go down.
5) Watch your traffic go up.
6) Profit

Just cant figure out where the "..." fits into this one.

Re:Sounds like the system works just fine to me

[capt.Hij]

That was my first thoughts. I was a little surprised to read that they *think* that Google knocked them down because of links from low quality sites. I did not think Google does this, but if it is true it opens up a whole new way to threaten people. Build a low quality spam site and then threaten businesses with adding a link to their site. A new kind of corporate blackmail for the internet age.

Push vs Pull and Demand Density

[ThosLives]

I think this is evidence of a couple phenomena in modern business:

The first is what I guess I'll call push vs pull, and that's the difference between business that cater to people who have a specific need "Hey, I need food, so I'm going to look for a place where I can get it" and businesses that create things they try to sell that people don't necessarily need but will buy on impulse - for instance, those businesses that are always sending fliers in the mail to get you to buy things you might not otherwise need.

The other issue here is what I would call demand density - if a business has to be online to reach people across the globe, that means that demand density is very low. However, a grocery store has very high demand density - advertising is only necessary (if at all) over a very small geographic location because the market is local.

Now, I'm not sure if I fully understand all the pros and cons of trying to support businesses with very low demand density - is society as a whole better off with the mechanism to provide goods and service to very disperse locations, or is the effort required to distribute the goods / services over such a large location really worse than not supplying that demand and eliminating the transportation / communications infrastructure overhead?

More to the article's point, though, if I had to depend on a search service to get my business revenue, I would rethink my business plan. While I understand the ideas behind 'global economy' I am still a bit conservative in my belief in the merits of self-sufficiency; relying on a search service means that my business would be at the mercy of that service which I may not be able to control. Control is fairly important in businesses, I would think.

Re:Push vs Pull and Demand Density

[Teancum]

There is another aspect to your evaluation here to consider:

The "low demand density" type of businesses may be hyper-specialists: They produce something that is so unique that while few people will buy it, those that do need it are willing to pay very good prices for that sort of product.

Armoured cars are an example of a product like this. An average person is not going to buy one of these products, and it is likely that you will only find a very small number of businesses who even sell these kind of vehicles, which are all custom manufactured as well.

Or to be highly specalized, a manufacturer of aviation-grade O-rings. If you have developed a process that improves the operating environment that these products can work in, you have something that is indeed very valuable.

The problem as illustrated in this article is that the businessman who is the focus of the article does not sell a product which is on the leading edge of technology, nor is it unique from the thousands of jewelry stores that you can find in small towns. While gemstones and jewelry have enough value that shipping these items anywhere in the world is trivial compared to the cost, the competition for such a product is so large that there really isn't any substantial value gained by going with any particular jeweler, especially for an on-line purchase.

This is exactly why he ended up in Google's "link hell". There is nothing that he is doing which is unique.

If this jewelry business specalized in something which is of a regional flavor, such as south-western USA jewelry (heavy in silver and turquoise) or set up some legitimate information pages that would add value for somebody coming to visit his website, such as original content describing the process of making jewelry and obtaining the gemstones, there may be some reason to have people link to this website. And push up the rankings in a legitimate fashion. But as just another place to buy gemstones and jewelry, there is nothing remarkable that can't be done directly by DeBeers or genuine gemstone wholesalers.

This businessman was also ripped off by this so-called internet consultant who tried to game the system without doing any real good to the content of the website. The $35,000 that was spent on the consultant could have been better spent in so many ways that it boggles the mind. Hiring a recent college graduate with an English degree (aka somebody who supposedly can actually write reasonable prose, and not some geek who can't use grammar worth a damn) to do some genuine scholarly research and fill up a website full of content about the jewelry industry would have been something very worth while. There are so many things that can be done to enhance a website to legitimately improve page rankings and make you stand out that you have to wonder why people engage in spamlinking at all.

Inverse

[Billosaur]

Skyfacet's consultant didn't improve their rankings at all, instead causing them to plummet. One wonders just how lucrative this sort of thing is? After all, if this consultant has done this for them, perchance he/she/they have done it to others? Perchance it would be a good idea to a) sue them, b) report them to BBB, and c) begin a this-google-consultant-sucks.com website.

Spending money the wrong way

[timholman]

After reading the article, I typed "diamonds" and "engagement ring" into Google, then looked at the sponsored links. No sign of skyfacet.com, Mr. Sanar's company. I find it hilarious that Sanar would pay $35,000 to some slimball "consultant" to try to distort the Google search rankings, but not spend one penny on Google sponsored links, which would put him on the first page every time.

I have zero sympathy for unscrupulous businessmen who try to game the system, get caught, and then whine about it. Kudos to Google for playing hardball and fighting to keeping their search engine useful and relevant instead of letting the spammers ruin it.

As a Webmaster

[garett_spencley]

This kind of thing has always baffled me. It is quite possible to conduct business online without relying solely on search engine traffic. While search engine traffic is valuable, if your business strategy is relying on that then you're placing your entire business in the hands of an independent party with it's own interests.

Google can do whatever the hell they want with their search index. Why on earth any company would place themselves entirely in someone else's hands, particularly someone else who doesn't have the slightest care in the world what happens to your business is really beyond me.

Any sane business person should enjoy search engine traffic when they have it, but place themselves primarily in the position where they don't need it. Relying entirely on an independent company with it's own interests for your business survival is beyond stupid.

Been in Google's shoes, threw in the towel.

[argent]

I used to have a site reviewing free web page hosting, back in the '90s when that was a relatively new idea. I had a form where people could suggest sites, and every weekend or so I'd go check them out, try setting up a sample page, and add the results to the list.

All of a sudden, over a period of a couple of months or so, the "request" page started getting flooded with suggestions for "new" free web hosting sites that seemed awfully similar, and offers to exchange links, and what in retrospect were obviously the work of the kinds of parasites that Google's been fighting. Pretty soon maintaining the page wasn't fun any more, and I quit updating it and eventually took it down.

Given that Google has to automate this process, I think they're doing a pretty good job.

Google is becoming irrelevant

[ehrichweiss]

It's true. They are in a losing battle with the web spammers who are developing an artificial intelligence based system that will make it so Googlebot won't be able to tell the good stuff from the bad, and if that weren't enough they ignore spam reports, and bury the reporting mechanism so deep that nobody wants to be bothered to report it anyway.

What this will mean is that we'll be on a user-ranking system like Digg or the like since the users can vote a topic down if it's spam and it gets buried almost immediately(well within a couple hours as compared to days/months/years) but since Google isn't prepared for that type of system, they will soon find themselves overwhelmed with spam.

I have at least one site that was permanently delisted by Google for some unknown violation and yet I get just as much traffic without them as I did with them. I don't think they're evil nor am I against them but if they don't wake up soon they're going to lose this game, not to Yahoo or other search engines, but to the spammers themselves.

I doubt it

[KalvinB]

If you have a lot of high quality backlinks then I think Google would be smart enough to ignore the low quality backlinks that don't affect your score much. They don't have to punish you for links. They can ignore them. If you have few to no quality backlinks then a bunch of spam sites linking to you would maybe have more of an affect. Google would assume then that your site sucks and you're trying to game the system.

I was highly backlinked by spam sites after a bunch of bots ran through the fields of my DMOZ mirror. My rank in Google went way up.

I got into Google Hell for not doing a proper redirect from an old domain. I basically flooded the new domain with traffic from old unrelated sites that had gone under from a server crash. About 6 months later I was back out. I don't have nearly the traffic but I still rank decently.

Google is not stupid. They're going to take a lot of factors in before punishing you. I imagine this clown did a cocktail of stupid things and rightfully ended up hosed.