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Being dropped from Google can result in the quick death of a startup company, or lead to the laying off of employees in a well established company.
Take our company for example. We are one of the market leaders in our industry. We have never used SEO or spam techniques, but after 5 years in Google, we were suddenly dropped from the index.
This being dropped from the index, leads to a cascade effect on other search engines, as we were dropped from the Google web hosted results from Yahoo.
The end result, is a 25% drop in traffic despite being well diversified.
For our company, this means I have to layoff 2 people in our order fullfillment department.
Google must address issues, where well established companies, are suddenly dropped from the index for no apparent reason.
I have two employees who are laid off, and I can't tell them when they will be hired back on, as I have no mechanism to contact Google to get the problem fix.
I would gladly pay several hundred dollars to place a google support call, to get the problem fixed.
I pay for support calls to my ISP, the phone company and for payment gateway services.
When they mess up, I can get the problem resolve in a matter of hours or less.
Google must realize that their inaction on technical issues, and the inability to have problems rectified, is having an effect on the economy.
We need to have a pay for support service for Google.
No body should lose their job because Google made a technical mistake.
What most here are failing to acknowledge is that, very few Webmaster have purposely put all their eggs in the Google basket, it's more a case of Google placing the basket under our eggs. Of course it's true we can prevent this, but reality is most of us here (if not all)have allowed it to happen as it's free.
Ign came here with a genuine concern and problem. Google Guy took the resposible position of assisting, despite many here making smug hypercritical statements that Google should do nothing as it owes nobody anthything.
I am starting to think that it's best if Google DOES ignore some Webmaster as they are only shooting themselves in the foot and biting off their nose to spite their face.
Dave
Firstly, there is no real evidence that Google **isn't** acting responsibly. Indexing the whole web and trying to index it "fairly" is a complex undertaking. Of course mistakes will occur, sites will be dropped, and "subjectivity" does occur - if only in the choice of the elements they use to "rank" sites.
Just the fact that GoogleGuy is here, and that various free methods such as email addresses to address these issues (regardless of the efficiency of these methods) are available is further evidence that Google does "try". With 3 billion pages or whatever, you would need an enormous support staff to provide service to all who feel they have been treated unfairly.
Secondly, yes it would be nice for people to have a paid way to find out why they are not included or check whether a mistake has occured. However there are several problems with this, the most significant and dangerous to google's model meaning that any direct payment will favour sites that can afford it, or have revenue coming from the sites that can be used to "pay" for the query. So commercial, affiliate, corporate and sites with a revenue stream will have an advantage over sites that are public service, community based, government information. These sites have been from the start, the main reason why people go to the web - to find objective useful information. These either may not have the money, or the knowledge, to do this sort of thing. Currency issues also occur. To a US site with revenue of 10,000 a week, $200 may be afforable, to an Indian site with revenue of $20 a week, even $2 may be not affordable.
The problem is if Google allow any type of "paid" service for webmasters, from paid inclusion to paid queries to paid whatever's, it affects the delicate mix between commercially and free-info type sites.
I have sent off a spam report and have included the information you requested. Also I am under case #3426804
The spam report needs a Thank You screen. After
I entered submit, I was put back to the google home page. Hopefully the spam report did go in.
So I guess we now have a definitive answer on 301 redirects. There will be an interuption in service until google processes the redirects. The people who have posted otherwise on 301's must have been very lucky, to get no interuption in service.
Webmasterworld has been a very good source for information, but one must be carefull, some information given is not always correct. Its best to check several threads and get a consensus.
Open an Adword account, spend some money every month and you will recieve a Google rep. that will answer any questions you might have.
I have a rep. he always send me emails I never had to contact him yet plus I have traffic. Like anything good you have to pay for it.
If you're hard drive fails do you have a backup? If the power goes out what do you do? If five people call in sick the same day what's the plan? If a major source of traffic disappears what's the Plan B?
A lot of posts here talk about Googe's "social" or "corporate responsibility", but as business owners and managers we have a responsibility to our shareholders, employees, families, and ourselves. It makes no diference who's fault an external event is when it comes to your business. It's how you predict it, avoid it, plan for it and ultimately handle it that counts. That's leadership.
Brett's post was spot on.
I'm not directing this to anyone in particular, btw ;). Every business situation is different and we all have our vulnerabilities like it or not. I (try to be) the last one to make judgements. Just talking generalities here.
Why don't people answer the question the thread presents? Why does the discussion always twist and turn in directions that aren't always relevant to the thread?
In this case, the question was:
Google and Corporate Responsibility
Google needs to address sites dropped for no reason
The poster then goes on to tell us (in his second post) that he attempted to change his primary domain from widget.ca to widget.com, using 301 server redirects.
So was he dropped from the index? And should Google need to solve this problem?
Ign made a concious decision to change his domains, which by all accounts previously did well, from .ca to .com, and expects that Google should solve his problem for him.
He doesn't need Google's help, what he needs is a professional SEO to guide his decisions. He said he would "...gladly pay several hundred dollars to place a google support call, to get the problem fixed.", yet the problem wasn't with Google, it was with Ign's decision to change domains.
So, my recomendation is for Ign to spend those "several hundred dollars" on a professional SEO, who can help guide his actions, and in teh future maybe he wont have these same problems.
Back to the original question, What is Google's responsibility in this case, and others like it?
IMHO, google should ammend this page, [google.com...] to include a section at the bottom, under "3. Other reasons" that reads:
* You have changed domains or page names. If you change domain names, either for branding, regionalisation or other reasons, e.g. from www.edomain.com to www.domain.com or www.edomain.com.au, your pages may not initially be found.
Conversely, if you change page names, Google may be unable to find these pages, or these pages may now have insufficient PageRank to stay in the index.
If Google continues to add such information to its webmaster pages, IMO they are adding a valuable service for webmasters and have fulfilled their corporate responsibility completely and utterly, given the nature of the Webmaster / Google relationship.
( mods - its a joke :) )
I thought Bretts comments were particulaly smug, callous and baseless.
I am just so thankfull Google doesn't have the same attitude as many others here. I large company never stands so tall as when it stoops to help the 'little guy'.
BTW constantly resorting to name calling like "whining", "whingeing" etc means they have no counter argument.
Dave
Google does have a responsibility to maintain stable serps. period
We do "Pay" Google.. we afford them the opportunity to become the largest Search engines in the world by letting them have access to OUR websites/material.
With out US google is just a word.
It's a 2 way street and people are now beginging to see the elitism creeping into Google and they dont owe you crap attitude..
Google will once again be just a word..within a few short years if this attitude remains. Because
It appears some people want Internet search to licensed and the provision of that license to depend on certain conditions being met. Even if this were the case, would "stability" be one of the conditions. I doubt it. The conditions of the license would be those that served the public interest. That would mean retrieving the best current information, not yesterdys, perhaps flawed, information.
But the fact remains Google weilds way to much power/control over searches.
The very fact that 90% of webmasterworlds discussions seem to center around Google is evident of that.
Google controls..what are numbers today 70% of all searches?
Something has to be done and if it means government intervention then so be it.
That would not exactly be fair to newcomers, would it?
<<Something has to be done and if it means government intervention then so be it. >>
Don't wait for the government to solve your problems, real or perceived (which government, BTW?) ... start the revolution by placing links on your own site(s) to recommend a different search engine to your visitors.
IMO, every individual and corporation has an obligation to be a good citizen. Not only should a company be concerned about its direct stakeholders, i.e., customers, employees, stockholders, vendors, etc., but its indirect stakeholders - its neighbors, its community, and those whose businesses or lives are somehow interlinked.
For a small business, the major focus is often on mere survival, and even direct stakeholders may get short shrift. As a business grows and prospers, though, one expects it to behave in a mature and responsible manner.
One example: If I manage a company with a money-losing plant in Ohio, I many decide to relocate that operation to a location with a better cost structure. This clearly serves the stockholders well, but I should weigh the impact on the employees; perhaps there is a way to achieve the cost-savings in the current location? Or perhaps through transfer to other operations I can assure continued employment for some employees?
Going beyond those directly involved, I'd be a callous business owner if I didn't consider the impact on the community. Even though I may have no direct relationship with the businesses that have sprung up around my plant, my action in relocating may be devastating to them. I certainly can't continue losing money to keep these unrelated people in business, but as a good corporate citizen I should at least keep these concerns in mind as I chart my course. My action might be as simple as giving them as much advance notice as possible of impending changes, or as robust as contributing to a redevelopment effort for my vacated property.
Getting back to Google, I'm not sure if they have any kind of moral obligation to webmasters, but they must certainly recognize their impact on many web businesses. I don't think Google should make business and technical decisions based on what might hurt some webpreneur's business, but I think they should at least be aware of the consequences when they make these decisions.
My solution: Google should do what it takes to deliver quality results to searchers, even when SERPs change. But, penalties and major algo shifts to downgrade spammers should be done in a way that minimizes collateral damage. And, perhaps most important, Google should have an efficient and knowledgeable problem resolution mechanism. I've had mixed results with reinclusion requests, and virtually all communication through normal channels has been characterized by no response, form-letter responses, or inaccurate responses.
I do think Google does many things right. Hats off to GoogleGuy for his own missionary efforts in this area! His efforts demonstrate great individual and corporate citizenship. Now if only Google would let GG hire a team of ombudsmen... (Should that be "ombudspeople"? ;) Maybe ombudstechs...)
Sorry about the long post, but, to borrow from Mark Twain, I didn't have time to write a short one.
Anybody that thinks that a company which (whether it likes it or not) is in a position where is is helping to keep millions employed and can indeed cause people to lose their jobs (along with houses, cars etc) or create new jobs based on how much business it sends to different companies is not in a position of HUGE social responsibility really needs to re-examine their morals.
The fact that google is a free service is immaterial, hundreds of thousands of peoples jobs and lives now rely on them.
And anyone who says that companies should not rely on google traffic is having a laugh.
Let's say you start a new company and through advertising you are getting 500 orders a week. The google finds you and lists you on page 1 and you start getting an extra 500 orders a week. What is the CEO supposed to do, write to those people and tell them those orders cannot be fulfilled or take on an extra member of staff to deal with them? They have to take on the extra staff member, they have no choice, and if google suddenly drop them they would probably have to let that staff member go.
I find the attitudes of some people on here absolutely incredible.
and if google suddenly drop them they would probably have to let that staff member go.
If he drops in rankings he can do AdWords. That just cuts into his profit margin but he can keep his help. Most businessmen would rather lay off help than make less profit. That's their business, it's their choice - no one else's.
So then if someone gets a #1 Google ranking and hires extra help, are you saying that Google is responsible for making sure they stay in the top ten so they can keep getting that extra 500 orders? Is Google getting a commission on the profits from those 500 orders?
No penalties or anything like that, so once we get your multiple 301's straightened out, I think the site should be in good shape in the index. I'd start by dropping that second 301 redirect.
If AdWords -- for a highly competitive industry -- could produce good volume traffic and still be somewhat affordable, then that's great (what's your secret?)! But I think that's a rare case.
We simply can't deny Google is a huge factor in the current webonomics.
Noone can deny that a good Google listing has a huge influence on any webbusiness, regardless if the owner has actively pursued this good listing or not.
Google listings are a crucial factor. Nobody in this thread has denied Google's right to rank sites as they wish. Everybody agrees being dependant on Google listings alone should be avoided.
And still: Being dropped off the index has a huge negative impact on many business worldwide, even if the business owner is as responsible and careful as anyone.
All people are asking is that Google realizes this and tries to put a small part of their huge profits into mechanisms which enable business owners to contact them efficiently in cases of urgent problems.
Googleguy is a person randomly assisting some webmasters - that's a good thing, but does obviously not fulfill what is required for a effective communication channel between Google and the rest of the web.
The question is of course not, if Google should never change it's rankings. It's about solving problems like suddenly getting dropped off the index, like urls getting mixed up by Google, about messed up redirects etc.
As it is you usually get no reply or a formmail to any inquiry. I wouldn't exactly call it communism to ask them to put a little effort in improving that.
ps GG did you see the spam report I put in a few days ago?
Yet these no traffic engines are exactly the places you tell people to diversify too? It is good advice but it does not make up for loss of Google listing. You can only diversify so far and so fast.
No sorry, I really think people say "diversify' but they don't mean it. If they meant it they would be following buckworks advice.
>>start the revolution by placing links on your own site(s) to recommend a different search engine to your visitors.
Try getting banned from Google for 12 months, I can tell you it really does sharpen up the diversification skill set.
I can tell you it really does sharpen up the diversification skill set.
+
Yet these no traffic engines are exactly the places you tell people to diversify too?
I would imagine that the 'pay-for' skill set would be the only way to make up for getting banned for a significant amount of time, but the bonus when you get back in must (have been) be nice.
I would imagine that the 'pay-for' skill set would be the only way to make up for getting banned for a significant amount of time
You'd have to make up for the lost traffic, business, branding, and marketing somehow, and I bet it would be one or more of the following:
- Email marketing
- PPC
- Online Advertising (banner, etc.)
- Strong partnership development and marketing
- Offline marketing
I think you all need to give up your U.S. citizenship and move far away if you are so disgruntled with a free society that you feel the need to be controlled by a federal government in every aspect of your lives. Head down to Miami and borrow one of the incoming Cuban's rafts to go the opposite direction toward your Utopian dream society.
All kidding aside, you can't seriously be doing 100% of your promotion in free Google alone? I handle dozens of sites and none of them receive more than 50% of all traffic from Google. In many cases MSN brings in the visitors. You need to layer on your exposure in a variety of ways. Putting your eggs in one basket is just stupid. Even if Google was 100% the search engine YOU want it to be, what happens if their system goes down for a week for some reason? Are you just going to close shop?
Be responsible with your marketing and stop trying to turn our wonderful capitalist system into some communist government controlled market. Seriously.
