How Google Can Make or Break A Small Business 352
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."
No... (Score:4, Insightful)
$5,000 per site (Score:5, Insightful)
Go Google!
It's simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Just put some actual information on the site! (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet an article on "roll forming" would have worked just as well. If someone wants to find a SOAP client for GForge [gforge.org],
typing "gforge soap client" into Google puts you where it should - right here [infoether.com].
Seems like this is being made a bit more complicated than necessary....
Reassess your business strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Diversification (Score:4, Insightful)
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.Re:No... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$5,000 per site (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:$5,000 per site (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reassess your business strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
break yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Chicken and Egg problem. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
They miss the point, feel Google owes them (Score:5, Insightful)
(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.)
Re:Diversification (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, google is user-friendly, but (unlike windows) it's also the best of its kind. I don't think that google's dominance is a bad thing. I can't see any disadvantages in google being much more popular than the other search engines that are out there.
Who to blame (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Google is too much power in one place (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Diversification (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Google searches comes up because of people intentionally taking a crack at them. Litigious Bastards anyone? [scom.com].
Even miserable failure [google.com] still works.
Re:Google doesn't owe you a living... (Score:3, Insightful)
provide meaningfull content [wolfram.org] 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.
Scripted Sites (Score:2, Insightful)
Judging from my personal impression Google has become less useful lately...
just my 2cents
Google needs accuracy and fairness (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google doesn't owe you a living... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Make your site different! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google Adwords (Score:1, Insightful)
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).
Re:Google is too much power in one place (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We've seen drops (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google needs to tweak too (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:$5,000 per site (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd guess it is probably because most, if not all, of those consultants that will take $5k to get you a high spot on Google are just guessing or are even scammers.
$5k to get a number one spot would indeed be cheap. $5k to get told to make a bunch of annoying changes to your site that end up not doing anything other than waste your time is expensive.
Google's business model depends on them being a really good search engine, and being a really good search engine depends on making it so those $5k site tuneups don't work. The Google people seem really smart, so I'd be very reluctant to fork over a bunch of money to some consultant who says he has a way to outsmart them.
Re:Newest version of the Google Toolbar (Score:2, Insightful)
If you are serious (and not just trying to flame Google), perhaps you actually have some kind of spyware resident on your system?
Re:Ughh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google is too much power in one place (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone can switch to any search engine at any time. If in a users mind, Google quality starts to slip, they can go somewhere else in with a few key strokes and never go back. The thousands of internet startups that burned billions of dollars a few years back did not think about the concept either. Google got to where it is because it is good, if it changes, it will drop just as fast.
Gaming the system (Score:2, Insightful)
Search Engine Watch is Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Google paid links.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google Adwords (Score:4, Insightful)
- Waiting 2 minutes between submits.
Spammers can't be productive in that kind of environment.
The best way to get a good Google placement is to. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Our company just got screwed.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ah the good ol' feudal days have returned... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as crappy a model as the one based on having a domain name you think everyone will type in.
Re:Google Adwords (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Powerful - Popular, because they're good (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Our company just got screwed.... (Score:4, Insightful)