Sourcetool Replies (Score 3, Interesting)

Allow me to address briefly the two principal charges against Sourcetool: (1) that we are an arbitrager and (2) we are a link farm. Regarding the first point, I would argue that anyone conducting an online business these days is a arbitrager in that they hope to make more money on a visits to their site â" or on the repeat visits â" than it costs them to get people to their site. Even an ecommerce site is conducting a form of arbitrage. Unfortunately, with Google being the only game in town, we either have to figure out how to appear in the organic results â" which is virtually impossible for any directory other than Google Local â" or buy ourselves traffic from AdWords. While a handful of consumer websites might be able to capture word of mouth buzz and build an audience outside of Google, that is virtually impossible for B2B sites, the vast majority of which are lucky to get 100 visits a day. Most of my competitors in the business to business space charge companies for their position in their organic, which by the way is a much more profitable way to generate revenue on B2B site than running AdSense. I decided to do things in a very transparent way, clearly labeling the AdSense ads which made it much more obvious how I made money. The arbitrage issue dovetails into the link farm issue. How and when does a site become a link farm? Is Google a link farm because all of its results lead directly to other websites? In fact, 26 percent of the time people visit a Sourcetool result page, they click on an ad, which, by the way, is almost identical to Googleâ(TM)s organic to paid listings ratio. I invested $400,000 trying to get my organic results right. During the first 2 years, ironically, I paid Google $200,000 to license five Google Search Appliance services so that I could get the ordering of the listed businesses based on Googleâ(TM)s enterprise page rank. More recently, Iâ(TM)ve obviously been forced to cut costs and am using the open source SOLR search software to order the results. The NY Times reporter told me that Google complained that Sourcetoolâ(TM)s results led to a company profile page, rather than directly to the company website, something Google never mentioned to me in spite of numerous conversations on the topic. If I did that, I would be much more of a link farm than I am. In fact, I have invested well into six figures profiling the companies listed in Sourcetool and gathering the information that could be useful to a business buyer. Itâ(TM)s easy to throw around terms like link far and arbitrager, but itâ(TM)s demeaning to entrepreneurs who are honesty trying to build a valuable service. Clearly, Sourcetool.com could be a better site, and, if Google hadnâ(TM)t cut us off, we would be a much better site today. During our peak traffic days, we were receiving hundreds of company profiles each day, many from the emerging B2B companies in China. We had hoped to introduce videos of factory walkthroughs so buyers could visit plants without getting on a plane. But all of this takes money, and why would you invest money in a business that is controlled by somebody else who has proven to be a highly unreliable business partner.