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Businesses hate to deal with uncertainties. In brick and mortar business the owner knows that the shop will be there when she goes to work next morning, or next month, or even next year. Contracts with suppliers and workers make long-term planning possible.
On-line businesses depend upon Google to a large extent. However, one day you are #1 on your KW, enjoying healthy cashflows, drinking micro-beer in a pub, and then you come back on-line, and hey, now thanks to algo change at Google your cash-cow site ranks #654! You go to your secondary site and it has become PR0 from PR8!
Google, give us your algo and make advance announcements. Please.
To make the long story short, it is September now and I am left with 100,000 unsold swimsuits!
bummer. It sure sounds like what happens in the real world too, not just online.
Subscribe to a notification list for an auctioneer that liquidates businesses. Furniture companies with several million dollars worth of stock go bankrupt all the time, and google had nothing to do with them going out of business.
What we are getting is free traffic and one should enjoy when we get it and if we loose try agin ... but not complain...
Its classic Risk/Reward theory ...higher the risk better the reward...if one want a safe route go for PPC .
Can anyone imagine getting this kind of Free Customers in the offline world ... One has to pay something to acquire customers in the offline world wheather its buying a realestate in a prime strip-mall or local TV ads or well placed billboard ads or whatever! ...
Only online we can acquire customers free of cost and also complain when the free lunch stops :) ...
I think that Google cannot act alone now...
Google can act alone. It's search service was never conceived as a way to drive traffic to merchants.
One must keep in mind that Google's Terms of Service explicitly says that their services are not to be used for commercial reasons.
The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons.
chiyo's analogy about the fairground fruitstand is perfect.
Matter of fact, I sleep like a baby
just like the dotcom bubble bust, you need to have realistic expectations and ways of handling both growth and recession of business.
If your site really has the track record to sell 100,000 swimsuits, a lot of your business is going to be from brandname recognition, and repeat business.
If you were to suddenly drop from the SERPs you would have to fix your site. If your inventory were seasonal, you would have to buy adword and overture placement. It's a question of cost of warehousing and liquidating a huge lot of overstock inventory for pennies on the dollar versus selling the inventory at a lower profit due to a "positioning disaster".
If the algo was published, what makes you think that you would have a prayer of being in the first SERP? Every competitor with national/international company level resources would kill you in the SERPs because their financial resources would allow for the best SEO.
How much traffic do you suppose The Gap's website gets from google for keyword terms aside from "the gap" and "www.gap.com"? It's all about brandname.
Now look at the adwords advertisers for those terms....
My personal view is that most organizations, whether they’re governments or business or universities, get to a point where a certain kind of information hiding goes on. People withhold information.And my personal view is that the transparency of information, though messy, results in a better society.
That's none other than Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, quoted in an interview with AlwaysOn [alwayson-network.com]. He follows that immediately by saying "Google is organized to make that much easier". So, maybe an "open source" algo is the most truly Googlian approach after all.
Ahhh... savor the irony that one of the hottest and closely held pieces of intellectual property out there right now is held by a company that espouses a pretty liberal view of freedom of information! On the other hand, they do give us a toolbar pagerank indicator, which is more direct data than any other SE provides.
The line for that job starts behind me. :)
