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2 years ago, an estate agent acquaintance of my boss was searching on the web for office space in Birmingham on Google. Not surprisingly, he got loads for Birmingham, Alabama but being a UK agent, he needed space in England's second city. Finding almost nothing he realised that perhaps there was an opening for a commercial property website in the UK at which point my boss liking the idea stumped up the cash for a new website.
It focused on properties in Birmingham and surround and the business model was for estate agents to pay for their listing. Over time, the site has expanded and due to the amount of properties on there, we added niche sites for given towns. Each site would have a slimmed down database plus news relevant to this sector and the town.
All was good. If you wanted an office in Derby, we'd be on the first page of Google. Warehouse in Nottingham, same.
This is what Google wants....relevant one-click search. Independent results (all agents can get a free listing of their site if they wish, better rankings they pay for but hey we're not a charity) and above all living in the Uk and looking for Birmingham does not return Alabama.
Story over...the downside.
As we built new geographically focused sites, they were added to the main site under the headline, visit our other sites here....www.xyz.com - for commerciAl property in birmingham....next line www.abc.co.uk for offices in birmingham etc.
They were built With no malice and no wish to manipulate results. Yes it improved our rankings over all but the result of clicking any of those sites was that the browser got what they wanted - it did exactly what it said on the tin and was exactly in keeping with why we built the original site.
Having read webmaster world's forums to death, I now know that come the dark, dark day 3 months ago that we got kicked out of Google, this is why. We cross-linked our own sites - this is a bad thing........
But darker still.
Nearly every site that we link to (We provide our feed of relevant sites to them using the 'niche' sites we have built) has also been banned. They are part of a bad neighbourhood. This includes some development agencies, chambers of commerce etc.
We have now changed the structure of our site to get rid of the long list of domains - it looked messy.
Why, however should I change the look of all of our sites to please Google?
Simple answer they have me by the nuts.
If I don't build a site(s) they like I don't get in....if I lose all of my other sites we lose the ability to feed third party agencies. Similarly we want to list all of our sites somewhere on all of our sites to show the scale we're at so other agencies will see a relevant site/feed they wish to take.
In short, Google's automated system of banning spammers is not intuitive. It takes the good out with the bad and I refer you to the opening paragraph of this message - we built it because no-one could find what they need on Google. Looking now for commerical property anywhere in the UK takes you back to where we were 2 years ago. A few little sites then loads in the US.
Luckily for us as a business, we don't need Google but those looking for the stuff we offer do.
Google is not the internet police. I grant you that people don't need to use Google but given that they have manipulated themselves into a dominant position like Microsoft have, they almost own searching on the internet.
To an extent they are ruining the web and that is sad.
[edited by: the_bfb at 11:44 am (utc) on May 16, 2003]
Which brings us full circle Web Guerilla. I am fully in accordance with them banning anyone whose PR is completely self-generrated by their own network of sites.
My problem is that our PR comes in the main from a load of third party agencies linking to us and taking our data feed. We still got banned and worse anyone linking to us got banned.
This is bad in itself, however due to a spelling error, we inadvertently were linking to a 'competitor site' and didn't know - he too got banned!
The theory breaks down...
