MrSavage - 7:48 pm on Aug 29, 2009 (gmt 0)

Wow quite the thread here. Great resource tedster as always. What comes to mind is, as a webmaster, what are you going to do about it? If Google thinks this is what people want from a search engine, then that is what you are going to get regardless of fairness or common sense.

I really enjoy the added links, at the bottom of search pages with similar search phrases. This is very helpful. Also gives me good ideas. The fact is, this is sensible enough. Do they really need to go beyond suggestions, at the bottom of the search page.

What this means to me, and should for you, is how you plan your future endeavors online. I've stated before that some searches I've done, Google has removed "cheap" and "buy" from my results. I need to actually activate the words "cheap" or "buy" by clicking their link, "show search results to include buy". So in other words, I have to do something to make it happen. I personally think they should do the opposite. Give me my search results with "buy" and have a link asking "did you really mean to search the word "buy", click here to not include buy". See how nuts the thinking is on that? Reverse the logic and it's completely nuts. Am I stupid? I type words in a search box that I don't want in my results? I can't grasp this at all.

In closing, you should think further on this. Imagine for the past few years you have been building your business around "cheap widgets" or "buy widgets". Now suddenly, what just happened? Yes, your hard work, strategy has been a complete and total waste. Now you need to consider how often or what terms that Google will start to remove from your search results. If you business is based on cheap or buy, then I think you are in serious trouble down the line. Think about this for a couple minutes. It's not just some small change, it's huge for those people investing their time and strategies into certain keywords.

Honestly, I'm a bit afraid of the future. When search terms or phrases are getting manipulated by the search engines themselves, it tells me I need to consider a different line of work. It's impossible to predict what the search landscape will look like. If you are targeting certain keywords, how do you know if those will be dropped from search results in 6 months time? Scary thought for me, and quite frankly for anyone targeting these chosen keywords or phrase.

I see this type of movement as disregard or disrespect for webmasters and people who have put efforts into building their businesses online. Of course, the only downside with all this, is that the free traffic seekers, those folks trying to gain ranking are the only ones affected. If you are paying for ads, then you don't care about this issue. I guess I need to change my thinking. I need to forget about achieving rankings, and deal with the future which is paying for ads to appear on websites so I get traffic to my site.