Those of you who are regular visitors to MediaJunk will know that I have been defending Google in the face of harsh criticism.
I believe that Google did have to take action against spammers. But, the more the criticism pours in, the more I’m starting to believe that Google has gone too far. I’ll even go so far as to entertain the much-touted idea that Google’s recent Update has been as much about enhancing its AdWords revenue as it has been about improving the quality of search for users.
I don’t that the latter is necessarily compatible with the former.
One of the things that’s made me re-evaluate my previous high esteem for Google is the comments I’ve been getting (and still am) on my first post about the Florida Update.
While there have been some unfair gripes in the comments, there have also been some genuine posts from people who run small businesses and who will be hit hard with the loss of traffic to their sites.
Some of them run small, home-based e-commerce sites that specialise in niche market wares.
Like Seth, who has a small business selling “brain puzzles”. Or Bob, who stocks hard-to-get martial arts equipment. Or Kathy, who runs www.weddingAccents.com with her husband, and has grown to depend on previously reliable traffic from Google for her sales.
None of these small business owners have sufficient budgets to run large, persistent AdWords campaigns.
In January of this year, Wired magazine ran a story headlined Google Vs. Evil, which opened thus:
“The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.”
That article is now proving prescient…
Comments
4 comments
I run a mail-order business that has been hit hard by this so-called "update".
I believe you have helped some people out with getting back into Google. I don't see your email address here. Could you kindly email me, I'd be interested in availing of your services.
Regards,
Gail Delaney
San Jose DJ is the official, licensed business name of my company. San Jose DJ is my domain name. www.SanJoseDJ.com is my internet name. ~ You would think that if a person wanted to find my company using Google they simply had to type "San Jose DJ" and would get me instantly. That was in the past. Not now!! QUESTION: If a person can't find my company using Google, after typing the exact name of my company, isn't that enough proof that your NEW system has failed it's easiest challenge! Please go back to the way things were before you put me out of business.
Thank you for considering my request. I also speak for thousands of other small business you are hurting severely.
Earl
Coincidently I submitted my new site on 29 november. I don't use any optimisation, i'm fairly new to being a webmaster.
Googlebot came by on 30 november& 1 december.
After this first visit my page ranked #1 on much of the keywords in searches in my language and country. Googlebot comes back on 4 december and indexes 8 of my pages... The result: my page shows up at the exact last position of maximum around 1 million sites. Then one short period (less than a day )it appeared back on the 5th page, but now its gone again and i can't even find it on the first 53 pages.
All this on a search wich just includes the exact 2 keywords of my domain name and my country - a search in my language.
I don't see how a decent search engine could find related sites with such an algoritm.
Dirk,
That's a fairly wild swing! And a new site too... you can't have had many backlinks then?
Earl,
I have no idea if anyone from Google reads Mediajunk ... but we all know that they *should* ;)