Is Google trying to kill small businesses?

Lol that's pretty funny, but true Not much small businesses can do though short of pay for adwords or try and establish their brand better.

I got to admit I like your outlook on marketing. Its very refreshing to read stuff like this. Perhaps it IS time to start pushing superior content on my sites.

-Red

I have done some testing on whether or not the mere fact of being an advertiser seems to have any seo affect.

I have seen no evidence of that in my tests so far.

However, one must realize that it honestly probably would not be a bad metric to include as a part of their algorithm.

"real businesses" use paid advertising much more often than the "here today...gone tomorrow" IMer who largely just spams content and backlinks onto the web in hopes of ranking well.

Think about how many IMers would be out of business if they had to pay just $100 to "get in". What if the barrier to entry was $500. Think of all the junk that would be eliminated.

Would some good sites get hurt... of course, but the majority of the damage would be to nonsense sites.

Most likely because top quality results have an advertising budget where, as mentioned by others, sites like omgbesttvpurchasingguide.info do not.

Matt Cutts has never and never will be fully open and honest about the google algorithm. I am far from a conspiracy theorist...lol

But can you actually imagine what would happen if he did reveal the ins and outs of the algorithm. IMers would be all over it and exploit the crap out of the various holes.

If he publicized what he knows, the google search results would be made irrelevant in under 30 days by get rich quick IMers.

It is to googles advantage to have the algorithm remain a mystery. And most good mysteries have a little mis-information from time to time.

I can guarantee that if i were running google, there would be some mis-information to help me catch all the IMers who are trying to destroy googles search results in favor of personal gain.

Agree totally, with one possible rewording...

'Google has shown favor to sites built taking advantage of Wordpress's usability advantages'

"Powered by Wordpress" is not a magic bullet. The same thing can be accomplished with plain HTML and Notepad, but WP takes the work out of setting up easy to navigate sites.

Much like print magazines and newspapers, sites like Google depend on people trusting their 'product' (search results, editorial content). So they go to great lengths to erect 'Chinese Walls' between marketing and editorial departments.

Maybe a better title for this thread would be "Why won't Google let me cheat?"

Didn't Bill Clinton deny having "sexual relations with that woman" more than once?

Just because somebody says something several times doesn't make it true.

As Christopher Hitchens once said..."Perhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification."

They are just to (sic) smart for their own good

There's some truth to that.

Larry Page, since taking over, has pretty much proved he's so smart he's stupid.

As for Google lies, that's not their style. Matt Cutts is a straight shooter as far as he is able to reveal. The algorithm folks don't try to mislead people. I don't like some of Google's corporate decisions and their do-gooder initiatives occasionally seem pretty creepy, but Google's always been consistent as to their messaging with regard to website ranking.

fLufF
--

David,

Recent changes to Places/Local Plus shows clearly they don't understand small local businesses. Recently they said that if customers don't come to your actual business location then the business was to hide their address from showing in their places profile. This is just one of many things that clearly demonstrates that Google is out of touch with local small business owners.

As an example, service companies RARELY have traditional retail space. Companies like siding, roofing, concrete, landscaping and the list goes on. But local consumers want to see and know the addresses of these companies and its important that the addresses are displayed on their listings. I owned a service company for many years and you can bet for sure I wanted my address displayed to build help build trust and confidence to online viewers.

They are definitely not perfect but imho Google has created/adopted three incredibly affordable advertising alternatives for "local" small businesses with the ability to rank on the first page results in Local +, as well as advertising on AdWords and creating your own videos for Youtube.

Say what you want, but just a few years ago the traditional advertising options for small businesses were a lot more expensive, and for many - out of reach. Now any small business can be in the "game" focusing just on the tools that Google has to offer.

It is my opinion that Google doesn't care about any business, large or small, apart from its own. Nor does it care particularly about the quality of content on the internet, per se. Why should it? Google exists to make money for its shareholders, the same as any other commercial enterprise.

If, for some reason, it came to be in Google's best interests to give page one rankings to the exact match domain, affiliate review website brigade, then that is what Google would do. They aren't some altruistic entity out to improve the internet. They are driven by market forces just like any other company and will do whatever they consider is the best course of action to help them stay profitable and expand their business.

In other words, as long as it's clear that searchers want to view websites that offer good quality, relevant content in response to their search queries, then that is what Google will try to give them. If, however, it became apparent that searchers wanted the opposite, then THAT is what Google would serve to them.

From some of the previous comments it seems that there are some people who equate Google's search results with the level of quality of the internet as a whole. All that Google can do is improve the quality of their search results. Even if they could weed out from their index all the really poor websites that offer no value, this doesn't mean that these websites won't exist; they just won't show up in a Google search. Put another way, Google's search results might be full of the best, most relevant websites for a particular search term but the internet will still be full of junk websites.

Wait for it....no...no...OK now! Those are both the same algorithm now.

-- j

I write articles for a living and do a lot of research on Google. I noticed that in the last few years the quality of websites drastically decreased to the point of having to check three or four Google pages before finding decent content to read. Many of the websites on the first page were pure crap with spun or poorly written articles that made no sense.

Small websites with fresh, relevant content that gives people what they want, should have no problem ranking well.

No question this about sums it up. I really think a lot of this goes back to Vitaly Borker of 'Decor My Eyes' infamy. Google was embarrassed in main stream media by a clown like this guy and vowed to 'clean up' their SERPs.

They're better off showing authoritative sites for most searches.

That said, people are changing the ways they search anyway so 'small businesses' better be prepared for lots more changes online and not just from Google.

Robin, big boys do cry. Just not on public forums.

They do it in cushy boardrooms, then buy another lobbyist to cry for them in cushy government offices...

I can tell you exactly how a little guy can get a chance, but I am becoming unpopular here. The answer is collaboration. If 100 little guys made an effort to build a big, high quality website together they would make much more than all 100 small websites (run separately by small guys) combined. Easier said than done. Why? Because of fear and greed.

If the search results would actually end up showing QUALITY and RELEVANT websites (pages) everyone would be happy.

This is not what has been happening over the last 18 months...

Actually many of them do exactly that.

Have you not heard about:

Overstock.com offering university students discounts for putting up links from .edu domains?

or

JC Penny buying vast numbers of paid links and getting penalized?

or

BMW getting de-indexed for building doorway pages displaying different content to Google than the visitors by using Java?

It's all about what SEO firm they have hired and how far they are willing to "push the line".

It is very naive to trust everything that Matt Cutt's say. He is great spokesperson for Google, and that is his job. He will say what is beneficial for Google, not "the truth".

Exactly!

I have had several one-on-one discussions with Matt Cutt's over the years and I can tell you that he is really nice guy, but he is not truthful when it comes to questions about the Google algorithm!

Many years ago, shortly after the Page Rank toolbar first came out I asked Matt Cutt's if Google was using the toolbar data to find and index new previously "undiscovered" pages. His answer was: NO, absolutely and categorically not!

There were at least 10 of us old members at Webmasterworld who knew with 100% certainty that this was not true. We had run multiple tests to prove that Google did in fact use the toolbar data to spider and find new pages to index. When we were discussing these test with "Googleguy" :rolleyes: over at WW he tried to come up with all sorts of reasons why our tests could have been flawed. We had taken all of those issues into account already and could actually "prove" that Matt's statement was false...

Same is true about the "What a competitor does to your site can't hurt you" - i.e. "bad links" statement that went on for years. This was clearly false information being provided because Google wanted to avoid negative SEO as much as possible. Now they have slightly changed what they say in regards to this to something like: "There is almost nothing a competitor can do that will hurt your site"

Anyway, there will always be those who think that Matt Cutts is the most honest guy in the world, but I have been in the SEO game for 14 years and I know better!

If Google would never have launched the Page Rank toolbar back in 2000 they could still be using a much larger part of the "old algorithm" that made them successful in the first place.

This was one of the biggest strategic mistakes made by Google IMHO.

Exactly!

Like almost every other company in the world Google is listening to the WII.FM (what's in it for me) radio station and almost everything they have done since going public is about increasing their revenue.