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.'"
New Business Model (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Push vs Pull and Demand Density (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Inverse (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sounds like the system works just fine to me (Score:3, Interesting)
Been in Google's shoes, threw in the towel. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Waaaaaa, he tried to game the system (Score:3, Interesting)
got sent to the black hole.....
No sympathy here!
Re:Spending money the wrong way (Score:1, Interesting)
Suppose the 'mysteriously' winding up in the secondary index goes like "Ah, this guy is getting far too good results without us making any money out of it, let's put him in the secondary index, it might motivate him to buy sponsored links."
Just hypothetically, of course. Google isn't evil, they say so themselves.
And I still think he shouldn't have paid that snake oil salesman to boost his ratings.
Re:Sounds like the system works just fine to me (Score:3, Interesting)
Google is becoming irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
And Diamonds No Less! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Push vs Pull and Demand Density (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
profit? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like the system works just fine to me (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're running a website selling $3M worth of stuff/year, you probably make a nice profit margin, but nothing that can be compared to Amazon and the likes, so you depend on worth-of-mouth and search engines. A lot of those businesses have grown quite naturally, so has their Google rating. In the case in TFA, the business model isn't just "get traffic from good Google rating", since his sales have "only" fallen by about 1/6th of his yearly revenue.
So, although it is probably true that your business model should not solely depend upon "Google", most business models somehow depend upon marketing and so probably also does your own paycheck somehow depend upon marketing. For everything online, Google is the center of the marketing universe and nothing is more valuable than a good "natural" ranking on the keywords your businesses depend upon. Even the most expensive AdWords do not compare to the value of a good ranking.
Otherwise, I think this is a very good article on Forbes, indicating the huge damage you can create by bad SEO and the liability to yourself that comes with a good Google ranking. Forbes is also being read by people that do not know anything about the bad consequences that SEO can bring. I've tried to convince many businesses not to do business with shady SEO optimalization and have seen many of them go to Google Hell and back. Remember, Google is not only being used for pure online stuff, a lot of people search for their traditional "offline" stuff via Google, slowly replacing the yellow pages and lots of other traditional indexes.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been telling people that google doesn't look at meta tags.
Ensure that your content is original and unique.
How do you avoid duplicating the navigational links on every page? For example, I often use a page layout that creates menus and popout menus from nested ul's. All of that is duplicated at the top of every single page.
I doubt it (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Google's less than half the market (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, if Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL all think your pages aren't interesting, maybe they ... aren't interesting.
Too bad--Search engines should be neutral (Score:3, Interesting)
If I want to buy some fly fishing gear, I might search for "fly fishing equipment." Pretty straightforward, but the search engine has to decide whether I want to learn about the equipment, read reviews of specific items, or find retailers to buy from. If I then search for "Berkley fly rods," the engine has to make the same decision, and also has to throw in the possibility of the manufacturer's website. The trick is that I'm more likely to be looking for retailers with the second search than the first, so they should be given more prominence in the results.
All well and good, but (a) trying to build this logic is tricky, and (b) companies benefit greatly by landing high on the list for any and every remotely relevant (and in some cases, even totally irrelevant) search. Therefore, companies try hard to get their name up on the list as often as possible, and google (and other search engines) try to present a useful set of results.
The question comes down to this: Who is the search engine company beholden to? They're making money by selling advertising to companies, so they don't want to deliberately censure them; however, advertising is only as effective as the number of potential customers, so they want to maximise exposure--by providing the best results to the customer. Ultimately, companies and consumers are at odds about what constitutes the "best" results, and google has to sit in the middle, acting as gatekeeper.
Having a neutral algorithm that tries to minimise companies' attempts at gaming the system is a good system. They can use it to back their 'useful results' ideal, and avoid having to beat down companies directly, risking revenue.
In short, this guy paid too much money to a scammer masquerading as a consultant, and is paying the penalty for it.
Concept upside down (Score:2, Interesting)
I had a site that was, in a word, unmaintained. I didn't care, it was simply a file repository for certain wiring diagrams that I tended to reference, and I didn't make any effort to promote or hide the links. So what eventually happened, is that certain Google searches put my personal website high on the list, and I started getting traffic to my website, and with that came large logfiles, voluminous spam, and frequent "offers" to buy my domain name (although the offers never specified a price the person was willing to pay, so I simply ignored every single one of them.)
Occasionally I would write back and say "how much are you going to offer."
Finally, someone came back with a number, and I sold them the domain name. It's "searchportal.information.com" now, and I get a certain amount of amusement in the fact that the thing that I had linked there, which was of interest to nobody but myself as far as I was concerned, is the top link on that particular search page. Of course it leads nowhere but other spammy links.
It never occurred to me that people would want to intentionally increase their ranking. I always wanted ways to decrease mine. Ended up selling the domain name for a nice wad of cash, because the traffic it was generating was a problem.
Re:As a Webmaster (Score:3, Interesting)
There are businesses which aren't dealing with people who are searching, but for the most part today if you want customers you need to be in the top 3-4 of a search for your products. This might be more important than pricing, but more and more internet shoppers are using price gathering tools to the exclusion of all else. So you either have the lowest price or you lose.
How else do the crappy photo/electronics dealers in NY City get by with their practices? Price, price, price. When the three lowest prices are all from folks like that and your shopper is focused on paying less, they win.
Is it right? Not really, but that is where we have landed. Low prices beat out great service online. Low prices and high shipping will usually win out also, but some of the pricing tools have caught onto that.
100s of responses without a clue (Score:1, Interesting)
1. Businesses are forced to rely on Google.
A company starts getting traffic from Google. They need resource to fill these orders. Thus as soon as they hire that resource they are dependant on that Google traffic to keep staff hired. These staff were only hired to meet demand that Google provided. It is not a choice, unless they say no to sales from Google.
2. Dont Blame the consultants.
It is very possible the consultants did nothing wrong. It is likely they did nothing but a) optimise the site and b) found reputable and relevant links into the site. Google is very strict now. If you get too many links (of any quality) into your site at once you get a penalty. If you make too many changes to your site at once, you get a penalty. It is more than likely that the consultant got too many links in at once.
3. Dont Blame the company.
To say the company is to blame for trying to game Google is not true. Do you think amazon or ebay or any of the big players dont spend a huge budget making sure that Google continues to give them love. This company was simply trying to make the next logical step.
Obviously we dont have all the facts here. Speculation is pointless.