Bewenched - 4:58 am on Nov 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

I guess the big brands are getting the real traffic and business. Shame that the smaller businesses don't get their fair share... you'd think Amazon should also be relegated to Google Shopping only like the rest of the ecommerce sites, goodness knows they have plenty of money to spend on ads and affiliates that spam the web. And they have duplicate products and content all over the place.. the whole site is full of it. Why not make them pay to play.... or maybe they are.

I remember a few years back you could boost your rank in Yahoo by paying to be on the first page of results, which absolutely appeared to be a natural result.

I wonder if behind the scenes Google isn't doing the same thing.... it's really starting to look that way. They are a publicly traded company and it would certainly be within their right to "tweak" results to suit their bottom line and share holders... nothing unethical about doing that... honesty, well that's something else.

Maybe we should all just turn into Amazon affiliates and sit back and make small percentages of sales, have no staff, no techs, no phones. Or better yet, just outsource all our customer service to India, host millions of sites that scrape other peoples content and images and don't pay our state sales taxes where we have warehouses. (yea, amazon does all that and more) Why would Google give such preference to a company like that.

I hope this latest "shake up" passes soon, our conversions were decent until about 4pm central time today, then nothing since. I'd love to know why we get this zombie traffic.... and why sometimes in google shopping it shows two clicks for a product yet only ONE page view.

Sorry for the rant, it's been a long hard couple of years and this year has had it's share of sleepless nights battling bad bots, updating source code and it just seems all for nothing.