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What a Deal. Where in any other advertising media can you find a deal as good as you can get on Google free web site listing (with work, patience, and some luck that is, that is)?
How long before pages 1,2, & 3 become so valuable that engines like Yahoo and Google can no longer resist beginning to charge for any listing in any form on those pages?
Get it while you can people! What a deal!
Thats quite a chunk of keyword traffic you get - Congrats :P
Search free or die!
But, even if we had that, we couldn't keep up with the buiness it would bring (not yet anyway). haha
On your observation, not so sure about that. Don't see the logic that dictates that has to be so. It doesn't take into the account the evolution of the internet and practical economic realties of the evolution.
These are the golden years of internet in this regard. Get it while you can is still what we say. Let's hear more views people. ha! While we are waiting.... ha.
The process will remain, the placement will remain, however a fixed fee for the previledge of participating.... or annual fixed fee. Is seen in the crystal ball in the future..
Again, just one's thoughts.
The ability for consumers, researchers, and casual surfers to instantly speak to each other would also put the halt on any attempt to completely commercialize a SE's listings. Couple of flashes on a blog, or a thread in a forum and the world would perk up and see. If the rumors were true, even a giant like Yahoo would tumble, as people went to information sources that did not allow people to manipulate the data. To pay the company to tell us what to think, this is not TV and it never will be.
j
i said paying just for the priveledge of playing the same game we are playing today....
Simply put - only having advertisers on the first few pages will mean few visitors, therefore little value to the advertisers.
How long before pages 1,2, & 3 become so valuable that engines like Yahoo and Google can no longer resist beginning to charge for any listing in any form on those pages?
Well then, at that point Google would no longer be Google. That's the wonderful thing about it. There will always be someone waiting in the wings to pick up where others have faltered. For lack of a better example, I'm sure we all remember Napster.
- Chad
with all due respect.. as one said, the minute you sell out and charge for placement is the day your days are over..what makes google what it is is that is is free.. hard work gets you your income, without the help of google my business would not be what it has allowed me to do, but I also put in about 80 hours a week of work and took big financial risks. I owe google big thanks.. but it is hard work and google is free.. if you can put in the hours.. its not easy, still. If google starts charging for placement, or whatever it is you are trying to say, people will switch to the new guy who is free and unbiased. Unbiased being the keyword.. spam and google will throw you out, try and pay and you will go on the side, you cant buy your way into the top of the results and that is what makes google so good! If you want to buy your way in then go to AV, but I think your better off trying to do well in google.
Ahmen! :)
For Google to still be Google, those free site listings are philosophically very important, regardless of economics.
However it's also puritan, but hopefully that philosophy will win over the money and keep the wolves of pages 1, 2, and 3 at bay.
cheers.
Even if free traffic remains part of the big picture for a long time, for an individual business it can go up and down like a yoyo depending on the algorithm of the month. Wise marketers will cultivate traffic from as many sources as they can besides SEO.
I look at it this way: If 80% of my traffic comes from Google, I'd better make sure that the other 20% is enough to survive on!
By the way, google is a very rich company with giving these free listings, they are competing with OV in a relatively short amount of time, plus all the contracts they underbid and won.. trust me, they are making the money.
G leaves itself an out with statements like--TOS
"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, such as advertising sales."
The big-bucks-but-no-useful-information sites will have top placement, and the good sites with excellent content will not be listed, or will be buried in the listings, because the site owner can't afford to pay the price to be included.
It won't take long for people to figure out that their quest for information is going to the highest bidder. They will seek out another SE that does what Google does - or tries to do - right now! I don't think there is a delicate balance to SE results. If your page is that good, why would you have to pay to get it listed? Advertising has a place on the Internet, and on the SEs as well. Its place, however, is not in the search results.
Here are the simple facts of the matter. Google is one of the few companies out there that are making money, lots of money. They expect to make close to $1,000,000 per employee this year!
The only reason that they make that kind of money is that they are the place to go to do your searches. They will make that $700 million at less than a penny a search.
If Google loses any of their credibility, not only does the total number of searches drop, so does the amount that people are willing to bid for those ads, so the amount that they earn for each search will also drop.
If their traffic drops by 25% and the amount that they make per search drops by a similar amount, then that $700 million is suddenly down under $400 million.
Google's money is in keeping the volume high. The only way that they keep that volume high is by keeping their reputation clean.
Now if Google goes to a PFI type model for those first few pages, and they decide to charge an average of $500 to get listed, they will need 600,000 sites willing to cough up the money to just make up for the $300 million that they lost for that 25% decline in the money that they WERE ALREADY MAKING!
Walmart could make a lot more money if they started charging list price for all their merchandise .... for about a month. That was Kmarts big plan, change their image form bing the low price blue light special store. Look where it got them.
Look what happened to every other search engine that went to any sort of pay system. People were willing to put up with advertising, but they wanted clean results.
