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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.
I handle dozens of sites and none of them receive more than 50% of all traffic from Google.So they are in a worse position than Ign is.
Try getting banned from GoogleBeen there, done that do to a rookie mistake. Ended up creating a new site because the old site was penalized for eternity even though it had been cleaned up.
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.Isn't that the truth.
Yes, I can tell you, it most certainly does. And in spite of top rankings across all the "majors" sometimes that just is not going to be enough. Especially those who are not on a corporate advertising budget.
It does not negate the underlying fact that we have let the search engine industry fall into the hands of 2 - 3 corporate oligarchs. When they truly start battling each other, corporate responsibility, will go right out the window. Google owns half and Yahoo just bought the other half. Where are we going to diversify too in a year? MSN?
We better start looking for some new up and coming engines and help them gain a foothold or we are all going to be like the flea caught between Yahoo's hammer and Google's anvil. Otherwise there will be darn few decent options left.
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.
Google has a large group of idealistic PHD's who apparently truly love
theoretical concepts with respect to data handling but have
little or no regard for business or social impacts that result from the implementation of their idealism
This is why we all developed a dislike to MS. He was cool...a college kid, who rebeled against the system, dropped out of college, and gave us all computing power "A computer on every desk in every home"; when the rest were just busy keeping the technology to themselves to make moolah. But then somewhere along the way MS lost his way, started becoming big bully, with all his control techniques and killing anyone who innovated. His purse strings swelled, but for us he has become an ugly man with ugly ways. He is now on a massive PR exersise to win our hearts back, but we are not won, and I don't think ever will be.
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
You need to take your whole responsibilty more seriously. You need to address this in your typical subtle but effective fashion.
Don't go the MS way.
but have little or no regard for business or social impacts
How do you know that? Read their minds?
Maybe I'm living in some small niches far away from evolution storms ... but I see improvements countervailing aggravations. And I appreciate recent implementations concerning user interests, and not specialized webmaster efforts.
the problem is that we love you
Sorry if disturbing ;)
I agree in a way that Google should give some kind of explanation perhaps in the form of an e-mail outlining why the site has been dropped but at no point do they hold a moral responsibiliy to do anything for anyone. I think someone mentioned this earlier in the thread however my brain fried half way through reading it.
Google is a free engine and as such you are lucky to be in it. If I had my way and I was one of the people who ran the Google algo I would most like be so anal in my banning of sites that you would all try and shoot me.
As a summary: Google owes you nothing and if anything you should be giving back to Google for all the business it has sent you.
Thats my jab and jive...
S
The idea being.. well we all now if you are not on page one... you're simply not getting for the moost part decent traffic.
I am talking about the top 20,00 keywords/phrases or so. At least with a rotational serp you know at least 2-3 months out of the year you wil be page one..maybe more.
The sponsored listings would maintain a few top spots, adwords still remains unaffected but for all of us fighting of the free for all listings.. knowing most of your sites will at least pretty much be gaurenteed to be at least on the 1rst page a few times through the year .. every page for it's search term..
WEll that is about as close to stability as I belive we could ever come without making the serps stale.. in fact the rotaional way always keeps the serps fresh.. and as relevant as they are today.
If your site is freash, maintained updated and googlbot sees this then it would be included in the rotaion. Dead sites would falll out of the rotation.
I am in a rush but you get the idea... . think about that for a minute and ..what do think something like that could work?
If you optimize a site correctly then you will appear in good spots on many of the majors.Many of the majors? After Google and Inktomi who has a basket big enough to hold an egg?
Not even close.
Back to the subject, I believe Google should be doing more in resourcing this area, the only question is how and by whom is that going to be paid for?
On the subtext of this thread "does Google owe us a living?" I can share this. We have recently moved house, next door has a lot of Apple trees that over hang, many Apples fall on our lawn. My 6 year old at first thought that we had Apple trees, but after a brief explaination accepted that the fact that someone elses Apple trees drop their fruit on our lawn does not in fact mean we have Apple trees. She now knows that to have a reliable source of Apples we need to tend and care for our own trees and not depend on others to do that for us.
If a 6 year old can work that out....
Google free listings = free..! = no responsibility whatsoever...
Google paid listings = costly = ask them and they will help...
S
What if the search is "best cure for cancer" and the best answer is buried in your rotation, whereas if there were no rotation that website would be top until such time as it wasn't giving the best cure for cancer
The rotation may well serve webmasters but I am not convinced it will serve the public.
But is the information given really "best cure for cancer"? In what person's point of view? I guess that's involved with the subject of this thread.
Sorry, but that's trivial.
For most topics, there are a few truly authoritative sites. If searching on a product, it is often the site of the company that makes that product. There are also research sites, consumer information sites, index sites, etc.
If I search on "Subaru outback" would you not expect to find the Subaru website on the first page every month? While rotating dealers might be "fair" to those commercial sites, it is not fair to the consumer that the reviews of the outback also get rotated into neverland.
Remeber, Google's priority is to give the user the information that they need.
Please explain why my pointing out that Google should be serving the public at large and not webmasters is a trivial point.
Truly authorative information (not just some quack pushing snake oil) would gain extremely large Page Rank on such a topic, if it were the Real McCoy.
I fail to see why authorative information should be shuffled about to appease a commercial webmaster who feels he deserves some free listings.
Only partly true, insofar as keeping marketshare is conditional to making profits.
Google is in the advertizing business. They sell ad space. The more eyeballs the more adspace to sell.
Advertizers get the attention webmasters with free listings sometimes would love to have.
But: without all the free listings in Google's index there would be no Google. It's a symbiotic relationship, and I think Google knows that. The problem is just support is cost intensive.
The "free ride" only goes so far..
I still belive everyone has to WORK.. put an decent effort to get past the othe 500,000 pages or 5 million pages ...
The idea is to rward those who are paying their dues by working their sites, keeping them relevent and fresh..
I am not so far to the left that I think EVERYONE is entitled to be ranked simply because they are in the database..
But I do know their are hundreds of thosands of small businesses , good webmasters that put forth tremendous efforts and will never either make it even close in the rankings to where the traffic is ..
If you went 4 pages deep (on keyword rotation) instead of only 1 deep.. thats a 75% increase of businessess) that will be able to partake in real traffic.. Keping in mind this is the "free traffic" out of those .. how many that get a taste for that traffic would then partake in an adword caimpaign when they fall back to the last page of the rotation!..
Everyone wins.. everyone gets apart of the action.. google gains adword revenues... I mean . hell if I knew I could get front page at least 3 -4 months (on many of web sites / pages).. I'd then have revenues to pay an adwords caimpaign at least to where my ROI would work out then..
Googles serps would always be fresh with relevent content . Thinking froma surfers point of view .. geez, I search on anything I I can almost gaurentee you which sites are on the front page....the same ones that were there the last time I searched.. see I am lazy like MOST searcheers..if I dont see what I want on the first page or sometimes in the second.. I am gone looking elsewhere..
With a rotational service you get fresh/different content ..but still relevent content.. something new to look at .. Goolge would be serving it up instead of the Lazy searher "working" for it (which he isnt going to do anyways).. and I think most studies would show that as so.. (that they wonty go more than a page or so)
Google certainly exists because it indexes information, and it does so for free. But the argument that some people are pushing is that it isn't enough to be listed "somewhere" its that when someone who was listed at the top is now listed on page 50 Google has somehow failed in its responsibilities.
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.
sorry... I don't get it. I'm ranking well and making money, then my competition outranks me, I make less money. It's google that's responsible for my business levels? I should be able to sue them at this point? Obviously not...
So you mean only in cases where they drop you completely from the index for unknown reasons? That's a pretty narrow vein for HUGE social responsibility to flow through, no? They don't owe you anything beyond crawling you, but everyone is owed the crawling?
The fact that google is a free service is immaterial, hundreds of thousands of peoples jobs and lives now rely on them.
still... I'm not suing the guy who wrote sendmail if I'm not making enough money on emails, or if an email of mine doesn't get through and I lose out. How many millions of peoples lives rely on that hunk of code? Microsoft does not have any responsability towards the business levels of the engraving shop that I had something engraved at yesterday that was using proprietary software on windows 3.1 that they could not get O/S support for if they cried. What if the machine crashed, charge MS for the lost business?
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.
but... anybody could find you and give you 500 extra orders a week, it's just that google might do it every week without stopping that makes them different?
so... you think that quantity is key? Lets say I start a new company and billybob is running a popular website. Billybob decided he liked our product, put us on his front page for free, doubled my business and I had to take on more help. Billybob then drop my link the next week, is he responsible for my business? Is billybob in an actionable position? Could I sue him? Does it really depend on how much traffic he pushes and how consistently he's capable of pushing it?
If billybob happens to run a website that lists what billybob likes the best when you look for it, same question. If his website happens to get a ton of traffic to its index via word of mouth. same question. At what point does billybob become responsible for the welfare of the businesses that sell the product he likes? When those companies decide they're going to rely on billybob telling people about it, and not rely on anything else, because technically, they could get by that way? Just seems fishy. Comforted by the fact that google is now a name your aunt recognizes, so is an apple when billybob's site is an orange? Meh. I'm young, and google just recently stopped being the new guy on the block to me, only a couple of years ago, if that. Billybob IS google, definitively. Google just got bigger than the rest, by word of mouth.
Those millions of people you reference could still be making a living off of the net if Google had never existed. The traffic patterns would be different. That's all. It would come from different places. It's the same traffic.
I spoke about the best answer to a question about 'best cure for cancer' (your example). Not only some G SERPs rotation may bring up problems. Trivial is optimization for that term. So it is never sure that the best page is up on SERPs even w/o rotation.
This thread was about G's responsibility, I thought.
... but doubting when reading some of the posts here, might be I'm a little old-fashioned.
Given your stance, I was perhaps a little robust in my defence!
I do think that most of the posts in this thread are sticking pretty well to the theme of the thread. The title of the thread was always going to promote a "lively discussion" between those who think Google has a responsibility to webmasters and those who think it doesn't (my position).
What does G owe to webmasters being paid to optimize for that phrase? And what does G owe to users searching for information?
I'm not saying that most webmasters are borderline ;) I'm only wondering about the crying for 'responsibility' to 'hard webmaster work'.
We choosed that job. We'll do that job. But we shouldn't be one-eyed.
Favour local sites <<<<<¦>>>>>>More International
Content rich sites <<<<<>>>>¦>>Favour heavily linked sites
Favour commercial <<<¦<<>>>>>> Non commercial sites
Favour older sites <<<<<>>>>¦>> Newer sites
Animated sites <<<<<¦>>>>>> Text only sites
Remember my settings for next time.
Where to download?
One to add:
focused on one topic ---------- diversified topics
To help answer the question of is this an authority or not Google invented Page Rank. Not ideal, but I would expect if an academic institution had a reliable answer to my question it would probably aquire masses of Page Rank. And that is my point - once Google has asserted that this is an authority page so be it. Otherwise Google may as well not try to rank anything, just serve up random results - all pages are equal!
Regardless of what we would wish for, the fact remains that Google IS a fickle partner. Smart managers should expect Google ups and downs and plan accordingly, much like farmers planning for the possibility of bad weather.
The ancient teaching that it's wise to use the "fat years" to prepare for "lean years" applies just as much in cyberspace as it did in the time of the Pharoahs.
I hear you, Namaste. In this case, lgn put up a couple 301 redirects, and the second one interacted nastily with how we were rewriting the url. But you can be sure that I'm going to be bugging folks around here to see if we can handle that rare case with the 301 redirect better. The goal is to handle it correctly any time that a webmaster does something unusual; we're not there yet, but we want to get there. I know that people expect more from Google; it's something that I think about pretty much every day. That need to make sure that we're doing everything we can to be the best search engine possible makes things pretty stressful sometimes--but it also makes it pretty rewarding when you can roll out something that you know will just work right for most people without them having to do something special.
Okay, that last sentences doesn't parse so well, but I hope you get the idea. Anyone ever see L.A. Story? The "interesting word usements I structure"? :)
[edited by: GoogleGuy at 12:55 am (utc) on Aug. 22, 2003]
Originally posted by albert (Message 171)
This thread was about G's responsibility, I thought.
Ign has had a great deal of help getting his site back in, help he claimed he couldn't get anywhere. Beyond that, he wasn't even dropped, he made a sweeping change.
Everyone else picked up the ball and ran from there, turning it into one of the world's longest sessions of complaints ever. If you want to argue what a thread is about, read the first post and description, not just the title. Often, subsequent posts take it in a totally different direction, usually to fulfil their own agenda or get something off their chest. That isn't necesarily bad mind. It makes it interesting, but sometimes confusing.
As for GoogleGuys comments above, it is good to see that Google is continuing to improve. With all the crazy, weird things that Webmasters and hosts do, it must be hard to plan for all contingencies, especially when crawling 5 billion pages.
I have said it before and I'll say it again:
A large business never stands so tall as when it stoops to help the little guy.
Dave
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.widgets.com/index.htm"
Response.End
This is somehow creating a double 301 redirect, as I was told.
If I use:
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.widgets.com"
Response.End
I put my website in an infinite loop as both domains point to the same IP address (ie CNAME alias)
I am giving up on this redirect thing, and have removed the redirect. This should get my site relisted, the next time the googlebot comes looking.
I will instead try to get all the sites that are linking to us to use the new domain. Eventually the PR will be reflected for the new domain name.
I already have a request into Yahoo and DMOZ, and it has been a week with no change.
Does anybody had experince with Yahoo and DMOZ on the amount of time before a url change is processed?
As far as hiring an SEO, I get 3 phone calls a day from people who are trying to promote my site, and most appear to promising stuff which I consider at best dubious or spam.
If I could find an SEO to consult on technical issues and who was above board and ethical I would be happy, but they appear to hard to come by.
This has been an interesting thread, with a wide range of comments. Hopefully, the people that follow in my footsteps will see this thread, and tread very cautiously when dealing with redirects.
