The Financial Times carries a story on Google's new policy of charging vendors to appear in their Froogle:
The change in direction brings an end to a 10-year-old experiment in which Google tried to filter information about products from the Web and make it available through a separate panel on its results pages. When it launched the service, first known as Froogle, the company said that not charging merchants to list items would give internet users "confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased".
Of particular interest to search engine optimization is the following observation toward the end of that FT article:
"We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date," he added.
Similar arguments could be made about other areas of information that Google presently indexes free of charge, raising the possibility that more parts of its service will eventually be replaced by advertising, Mr Sullivan said. These include Google Places, the company's local listings service, which relies partly on information supplied by restaurants, stores and other providers of local services. Google refused to comment on its future plans.
Small businesses serving local areas benefit greatly from search engine optimization strategies by raising their rank in Google's local listings. If Google starts charging them money, this will impact the way those local businesses see their search engine optimization investments. The question is,
how will it impact those investments?
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