Businesses Scramble To Stay Out of Google Hell 303
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.'"
Sounds like the system works just fine to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's obligation is to serve the consumer doing the search with the most accurate and fair results possible, not to ensure that sleezy companies paying big $ to "consultants" who game the system maintain their sales.
For shame, Forbes!
Business model relying on free service? (Score:5, Insightful)
So.. (Score:4, Insightful)
At what point is this guy any sort of victim when he knowingly exploited the system for his own gain and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar?
Play By The Rules (Score:5, Insightful)
I am by no means an SEO expert... but I've had VERY good luck with google indexes for the small sites I build for people. I've even gotten some business from it, because people some how think I'm some sort of genius. So what's my secret?
I READ THE INSTRUCTIONS AT GOOGLE FOR WHAT TO DO AND WHAT NOT TO DO AND I FOLLOWED THE RULES
If you simply follow the rules that google lays out, you won't get sucked into google hell. If you try and game the system by paying for consultants to "juice" your site, you gambled and lost. Bottom line: Don't be evil, and google will not punish you
Insequitir (Score:5, Insightful)
Why sites go in Google hell is a total mystery.
Story 1: A guy sold diamonds on his site. One day he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling him? He had no idea why this happened... ok... ok... so he paid 35 grand to a SEO "expert" who filled his pages with trash. He removed the trash and few months later he went out of Google hell. To this day he doesn't know how he went out of Google hell.
Story 2: A guy had a site with lots of visits from Google. One day, he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling? Ok... ok... so he had paid for a ton of links from spam sites, and he had to email each of the sites to get the links removed. Few months later he went out of Google hell, and this guy also has no clue what helped him.
Summary: It's a total mystery, that Google hell, I tell you.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
do not hire idiot consultants to raise your pagerank.
Which is not technical advice but should cover whatever fool stuff someone might try.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the guy. He tried to cheat, and when it backfired, he goes crying because he can't get un-blacklisted. Well, sucks to be him, but it certainly serves google's purposes (and the health of the internet as a whole) well.
Pre-emptive strike: I believe, in principle, on strong public oversight of corporate decision-making.
The *exception* is anything that might be considered an editorial decision, the dispensation of advice, etc. If it's not a tortious lie, they have a right to say (to recommend, to blacklist) whatever/whomever they want, because I have a right to choose to whom I will listen.
If you don't like what google does, you don't have to use it - but you can't force them to change what-they-say because you don't like it that other people listen to them.
Uh Duh?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Both of the "businesses" seem shady to me anyways, and their practices on optimization only appear to confirm that. They got caught, Google did what it's supposed to do. Now they're being punished.
Sure, they may have reversed any of said optimization, but as the article even says, it can take 6 months to a year to be indexed again anyways. So take two of these and call us in a year...
Re:Sounds like the system works just fine to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like the system works just fine to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's not get started on relying on a third party (Google) whom you have no contract with for a large percentage of your business. That's got to rank up there with Stupid Business Models 101 in my view.
Re:Google Official Response (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Business meets technology (Score:5, Insightful)
If they please their customers with the best possible results they will make more money. If they allow themselves to be gamed, searchers will go elsewhere and Google will lose money.
If you don't like that, go start your own search engine.
BTW, they have been sued over this kind of thing and they have always won. The ranking is their opinion and they are entitled to it.
Terrible business model (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand that proper advertising is expensive, I've got a failed business of my own due to not being able to put the necessary money into it, but guess what? That's business. You pick the risks you're willing to take and deal with the results. Basing the majority of your business on search result ranking is low cost (unless you pay an SEO expert $35k which would have been better spent elsewhere, like real advertising, or a new car, or a 35,000 cheeseburgers from a fast food value menu) but high risk due to the constant changes.
Re:New Business Model (Score:3, Insightful)
It's great that (as in this case) Google sends the Blackhats in to Google hell, although it still doesn't actually do it as successfully as many would like.
But since Google rankings are somewhat esoteric, it's hard for Whitehats to stay white. And in the parent's example - even if you are doing everything honestly there's nothing to stop a competitor killing your business in exactly the way described.
I see three real problems here:
- 1. Search is still not good enough to meet people's needs - very little tech advance in the past 10 years in fact.
- 2. Google has too much power.
- 3. No ability to appeal Google's decisions.
No.1 is obviously very hard to solve. No.2 Depends entirely on No.1 - or on Google losing brand power due to a number of factors (being evil not one of them - doesn't stop Yahoo or MS) - not likely any time soon. But No.3 should be possible for a company of Google's size and stature to address.Technology is fallible, humans are fallible, weird things happen - it should be possible to have someone at Google address these issues in person. If Google's algorithms are right most of the time, then that appeals dept is going to be very underworked. If however, they are not getting it right, then at least the appeals dept can address this directly.
It's only fair, not evil, and win/win all round really.
reap what ya sow... (Score:2, Insightful)
it ain't rocket surgery...
Re:Sounds like the system works just fine to me (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case they probably did know what they were doing though.
Re:Business meets technology (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not even close to true. Your customers are, without fail, the people that pay you (or at least, the people you're trying to convince to pay you). Searchers are Google's product; advertisers are Google's customers.
This is no different (in this respect) than radio and ad-supported television: your listeners/viewers are the product you sell to your advertisers.
Don't ever think that Google wants to make you, the searcher, happy - they want to make their advertisers happy. If the best way to do that is by making you happy (and so far, it pretty much has been), then lucky for you. If it isn't, tough cookies: you're not the one keeping the cooling on.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone comes up with a better search engine that also gains equal or near-equal footing with Google, then you can worry less about them, but I think it will be a VERY long time before anyone doing business on the internet can afford to ignore Google.
So while a business as a whole might decide not to purchase advertising via Google, and may not use Adsense, very few businesses can afford to ignore the monster that is Google.
Re:Business meets technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies which pay Google to place advertisements are Googles customers.
Companies which do not pay Google for advertisements are not Googles customers.
Random people looking for websites are not Googles customers either.
In order for googles adverts to be productive people have to visit websites, if they visit a website which actually matches with the sort of website they were looking for then googles adverts are more powerful.
Anyone gaming googles system to drive people to their websites without taking account of whether this is the best website matching the surfers requirements is hurting googles customers by not maximising the effectiveness of the audience for their adverts.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:4, Insightful)
It's sort of an obvious solution.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm saying is that this should not open Google (or Zagat) to any requirement for editorial transparency. If people trust information source A, and information source A doesn't recommend you, well, that may suck, but you should not have any recourse to demand an explanation - because your *potential customers* have the right to go to any source of information they want for advice, and your *potential customers* are not forced to use google.
This may in turn force businesses to do all sorts of things, but that's capitalism for you - your business does not have a right to succeed.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't. Nor has Rene who does the other big farmers gripe site.
In my case I had a malformed robots.txt file that excluded google for nearly the entire site (oops). Fixed that and front page here I come.
To be fair, there is not a lot of competition for the sucks sites, and none of us will pay for SEO, thus the field is level.
-nB
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
<Mr. Burns voice> Excelent. </Mr. Burns voice>
Re:Google has 2 incentives to GH sites (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice advertisement but your site sucks. Content and layout are poor. Maybe you need to check out the other baby name sites to see where you went wrong. Think quality over quantity.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
When businesses whine about Google, who they're really whining about is their customers, because their customers are the ones deciding to go to Google (or Zagat, or the New York Times theater reviews, or whatever) and use that as part of their decision-making.
Must have happened already, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly -- I'm surprised this hasn't come up more.
It seems that if I want to deep-six your site, which might mean your entire business and/or livelihood, all I need to do is find the most inept link spammer I can, and pay him a pittance to whore your site's URL all over the place, on tons of spamblogs and Viagra pages. All of a sudden, Google will notice, can your page off of the search results, and you're hosed.
I've got to imagine that this has already happened; heck it seems like a fairly good extortion scheme: pay us or we'll linkfarm you until Google notices and your competition slaughters you. It's like SEO, only in reverse.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:3, Insightful)
However if you do find yourself in "Google Hell" and see Larry Page approach with a big grin and a pineapple, before feeling sorry for yourself just remember all the perfectly valid sites your SEO tactics pushed below the first page boundary and know they are looking down from "Google Heaven".
Remember; it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a irrelevant website to remain on the first page. Only by truly accepting PageRank into your heart will your website receive salvation.
Mystery Solved (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sort of an obvious solution.
Agreed. Perhaps more to the point, maybe they shouldn't have been depending on the free advertising provided by Google in the search results as their primary source of customers.
Seems that the real lesson here is that you shouldn't build a business on shaky marketing, and search results -- which are basically the internet equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising -- are pretty shaky. It might get you started and off the ground, but you shoudn't depend on them always being there, and you need to have a plan for staying in business if they suddenly go away. Otherwise, you probably don't deserve to be in business, and they'll be plenty of other sites to take up the customer eyeballs.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:3, Insightful)
I find the concept that your business somehow deserves to be on Google's first page for 'diamonds' pretty bizarre. Google is about finding information on the web. If you don't provide it you move off the front page. Seems sensible to me. What will happen when twenty diamond sellers all want to be on the front page?
JON
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:3, Insightful)
What I want to know is: why haven't these 'victims' sued the living crap out of their 'consultant'?
I'm pretty sure the pitch session didn't run:
CONSULTANT: "For $35K, we'll set you up with a bunch of links that will drop your business right in the crapper."
CUSTOMER: "Sounds good. Here's a check."
There had to be some kind of promise that the client would get results they wanted, and that strikes me as sufficient grounds for suing the consultant to get at least the original $35K back. And given the results, it seems to me that they'd have a good shot at getting additional damages.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the contract was written with a 'no guarantee, no liability' clause, but courts chuck those out all the time. For the consultants to get away free and clear, they'd need to prove that the pitch session went more or less along the lines shown above. And if that's the case, then the client's StupidRank is right up there next to the people who lose their life savings to Nigerian 419 scams.
Gotta say, though: I wouldn't want to be either of the featured players in a Forbes article that essentialy runs, _Idiot Client Loses Tons of Money After Hiring Even Bigger Idiot as Consultant_
Re:Google Official Response (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:2, Insightful)
This may or may not happen, but in other similar situations there is no apparent reason to believe that a large user community goes for quality vs. well-known name.
Re:Google is becoming irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Forbes is the real story (Score:5, Insightful)
Forbes is just trying to put some negative publicity onto Google any way they can. As many have already pointed out, no sane business model relies entirely on the search results from another business that has no vested interest. Anybody working at Forbes knows as much, and yet we have an article talking about "Google's gulag".
The real information here is from in between the lines. A power struggle behind the scenes, currently Google is the target of some negative image campaigning. What I'm interested in is, where that pushing originates. Who 'owns' Forbes and is pushing for bad press for Google?
Re:Google Official Response (Score:5, Insightful)
I read all these articles about companies who think it's their right to have a high ranking in Google's search. Google is supposed to be helping ME find things I'm looking for. Kudos to them for tossing "search engine optimized" sites into hell. If they don't like it, they can go pay for legitimate ads somewhere.
Hey Google, we really need a button to exclude all sites selling stuff from searches. I hate having to wade through a pile of e-commerce sites when I'm looking for INFORMATION.
Re:Forbes is the real story (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole financial community hates Google.
The feeling started when Google snobed them for the IPO (they went with a public auction, preventing the financial institution to get their hands on the first dibs). Google even kicked them by selling shares with a voting power 10x less than the founder's shares.
It went worse when Google refused to post any indication of their growth or results past what the stock exchange require (no analyst hint, no prevision). And to compound all that, Google has exceeded the analyst expectations everytime, making them miss the best sale date.
Basically, Google has shown over the year it does not need the financial community as much as they need it and they still resent that.
Re:That's not what google is for (Score:5, Insightful)
Google search is a tool for selling ads. That's it. It has everything to do with Google getting paid by businesses in return for consideration.
Google AdWords is a tool for extorting money from businesses who are trapped into only having one kind of promotion available. If you don't pony up some cash, you're invisible.
And then it's just a race to see who can pony up the most cash. It'll certainly made Google's job easier when they're just a portal for WalMart.
Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)