How smaller Web sites will benefit from Google penalties

[EditorialGuy]

We all know that SEO and site owners hate Google penalties, especially penalties that affect them. But I'd maintain that anti-spam penalties are needed to allow better treatment of small Web sites and small businesses in Google's search results.

Here's my reasoning:

If Google's SERPs tend to favor big sites and businesses, users aren't likely to complain. Sure, a user might not find the lowest price or quickest shipping time at Amazon, and she might find it a nuisance to locate up-to-date travel information about Widgetville in a three-year-old TripAdvisor forum thread, but the user is more likely to be satisfied (or at least not dissatisfied) than if she'd landed on a spammy page with little or no intrinsic value.

Now let's fast forward from today's "big brand bias" to a future where (as Matt Cutts has suggested) small sites and small businesses will be treated more favorably in the SERPs. To make that change worthwhile, Google needs to ensure that the "small sites and small business" that move up in the SERPs are acceptable to users. Otherwise, user satisfaction will drop, and how would Google benefit from that?

By being more aggressive in purging Google's search results of sites that rank through questionable techniques, Google's anti-spam team are helping to level the playing field for legitimate sites and businesses in two ways:

1) They're removing or at least reducing the advantage that the "bad guys" have over the "good guys," and...

2) They're making it less risky for Google's search algorithm to look kindly upon small Web sites and small businesses.

But wait, there's more:

If a future Panda update does lead to better rankings for small Web sites and small businesses that comply with Google's guidelines, there will be a greater incentive for SEOs and marketers to eschew risky behavior. In the long run, this will benefit Google, "good guy" site owners and SEOs, and searchers.

[turbocharged]

No... Google needs their search engine to be the best possible product. Why in the world would they fix their search engine when it's much easier to build authority in these companies?

What "fix" actually means is dependent on ones point of view and the role they participate in online. Google's "fixes" over the last few years would be better described as "rigging" from my point of view, and I am not a SEO.

Auction.com, recently got a $50 million investment from Google. I just searched my city for real estate auctions for homes and the #1 Adwords AND organic positions were occupied by Auction.com. The same applies to other related searches in different major cities. Google will profit from not only their initial investment in Auction.com, and the organic traffic they send to this site, but also through inflated bids from those competing against Auction.com's apparent $50 million Adwords voucher.

The paragraph above should provide enough evidence of how Google's search results at least appear to be tainted by their own investments. I'm sure that other conflicts of interest can be found since Google invests in hundreds of companies. But this is not the time nor place for me to expand on that.

Penalties, whether algorithmic or manual, mostly impact small websites. In the case of small businesses, they tend to lack the notoriety that appears to insulate big brands. However, this does not mean that the products or services they sell are inferior to that of big brands. In fact, small businesses tend to be more accessible to customers and provide a superior level of support.

If we look back in history at the larger brands who have been manually penalized, most will recall how quickly Google lifted their penalties. Small businesses, confronted with the same situation, are left hanging for months and often are required to submit many reconsideration requests. Furthermore, Google has publicly stated that their infractions may be so severe that there is no possibility of recovery. Even with the sophisticated link buying schemes used by big brands, which is far more egregious than blog comment spam in my opinion, Google will never tell a big brand they are banished forever. They would lose an Adwords customers for sure. In the case of small websites, I believe Google views them as freeloaders. If the small sites are not willing to pay to be seen, Google's current search results would indicate they won't be seen in organics either.

[bluntforce]

Auction.com tried to buy ad placements from me for quite the long time. I wouldn't do it because I felt it wasn't a good product for users.

Wake up for me, it doesn't matter if it's a less than optimal product, what matters is the revenue that can be generated.

[Crush]

Anyway, all that said. It is what it is. There is some guy in health who is a small guy, posts once every week or so but in depth posts with a lot of social interaction and I can see him ranking with not much help, so there are ways to rank but you need to get your articles syndicated and quoted by loads of authority sites. I have an ecom site selling stuff and need to get my commerce landing pages where the eyeballs are to convert, not some in depth article on the benefits of widgets.

[ColourOfSpring]

....because if you are a "spammer", your product or service is inferior? And if you are not a "spammer", your product or service is superior.

Quite possibly. I wouldn't be surprised. But it doesn't matter, because users probably aren't going to wonder where your site went if somebody else outranks you. How often does a searcher say, "What happened to that site I've never heard of?"

Your view is the quintessence of naivety if you believe the quality of your products or services is somehow tied to whether Google deem your website to have used "spam" techniques or not. In fact, that would open the door to lots of lawsuits if that was their official view. I could easily become the unasked-for SEO for any given SME site online and clumsily (and deliberately) - and automatically - link-build it into oblivion. The site loses its rankings - it's products/services are therefore deemed inferior to its competitors.

Furthermore, a brand new site with an unproven track record of customer service or REAL testimony from past customers - is deemed to have better products/services by the mere fact that they are new and unproven! It's turning trust on its head - if you have no indication you can be trusted, you are.....trustworthy. If you have a great track record in regards to customer service and products, that doesn't matter if you have a few dodgy links pointing to your site. Those dodgy links magically transform your products/services from great to terrible.

To finally kill this idea that inferior products/services are hidden from Google's SERPs - Adwords! So Google assume that "spammers" vend inferior products / services, yet incredibly Google are happy to show-off these inferior products and services on their front page SERPs via Adwords. Actually, EditorialGuy, your view of Google here is worse than anyone's put forward - you're saying Google will take money to show off inferior products and services. My own view is that Google are not simple-minded enough to simply equate "spam" techniques with the quality of a product or service.

[EditorialGuy]

Your view is the quintessence of naivety if you believe the quality of your products or services is somehow tied to whether Google deem your website to have used "spam" techniques or not.

You're missing the point, and you're twisting what I said into something I didn't say.

The point is that Google and its searchers won't be hurt if 30 of 100 sites selling widgets, whatsits, or thingamajigs don't have a chance to crack the top 10 (or the top 100) search results as the result of spam penalties.

For Google, penalties create less risk of user satisfaction than an "anything goes" policy would.

As for AdWords, that's a red herring. Google Search and Google AdWords are two different groups, each with its own agenda and policies. Still, if you want to complain about AdWords, here's a great place to do it:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Side note: It's useful to remember that Google Search (the Web search we're talking about here) doesn't index or rank the quality of products and services. It indexes and ranks Web pages. Content may not be king in the SERPs, but it shouldn't be ignored.

[ColourOfSpring]

Side note: It's useful to remember that Google Search (the Web search we're talking about here) doesn't index or rank the quality of products and services. It indexes and ranks Web pages. Content may not be king in the SERPs, but it shouldn't be ignored.

EG, the fundamental purpose of MANY MANY searches online is to find the best service or product provider - or at least, a very good service or product provider. That's the searcher's goal, and it's Google's job to serve the searcher first and foremost. Agreed? And so to be a great search engine, you have to at least have the goal in your mind that for many transactional/commercial searches, it's a pretty good idea to give the searcher the best service / product providers higher up the results. Now the keyword here is "goal" - I'm not saying it's easy to achieve, but a search engine that wants to give the best results HAS to try and answer the intentions of the searcher. Ranking service/product providers by the best brochures they have is yet another false proxy (links being another) - and that's why Google have HAD to rely on big brands because they have simply failed at identifying the best service/product providers.

Excluding many great service / product providers from obvious discovery in the SERPs isn't helping the searcher even though your philosophy is "if you don't know these companies exist, you won't miss them!". This is to fall short of a better result set. In fact, I'd deem that as an excuse not to give a better result set.

Adwords is not a red herring. Regarding my point, it doesn't matter that these two departments are separate. In fact, we all know that Adwords follows the most prime rule of capitalism - money talks (which is really my point). I think it's convenient for Google that Adwords has a different set of rules to organics, therefore allowing a "migration" of penalised sites from organics to Adwords to occur.

[superclown2]

We all know that SEO and site owners hate Google penalties, especially penalties that affect them. But I'd maintain that anti-spam penalties are needed to allow better treatment of small Web sites and small businesses in Google's search results.

What nonsense.

We are all aware that small sites get penalties, whether deserved or not, very easily and they last for ever (or long enough to destroy a business) in many cases.

Big brand sites may get the odd one but they are usually settled very quickly. How and why I don't need to explain.

[brotherhood of LAN]

So, what am I to take away from this thread? I don't see how the topic is advancing our knowledge of how to use Google on a day-to-day basis.

[turbocharged]

So, what am I to take away from this thread?

I hope most people reading this thread will come to an understanding, if they have not already, that penalties are not a black and white issue. Just as Google uses hundreds of factors in calculating the rank of a website, we as users should not be reduced to considering a handful of factors when determining why penalties are given or how heavily they are applied.

The weight of Google's penalties alone can banish some websites forever, as eluded to by Matt Cutts. Other algorithmic related demotions, which are not communicated to webmasters, can damage small websites so heavily that their owners are reluctant to start anew after putting forth a significant amount of effort/labor over a period of months to fix something that they know nothing about.

As an ordinary surfer, I learned how to use Google by not using them. I see this as having privacy benefits as well. As a web designer, who has to listen to complaints from business owners wondering why they can't be found in Google, despite them doing nothing wrong and having good content, I tell them to check Yahoo and Bing where they are at least able to be found. Explaining to clients why websites can't be found in Google does take time, which I can't bill for, and you can judge by my posts that I don't beat around the bush and call it like I see it. As an ex-Adwords user, I pitch Google's vouchers when I see them. Since I don't do SEO, I can't offer too much of a perspective on that front. But I will say that as an American I am quite concerned with not just how big Google has grown or what data they are collecting, but how they are destroying small businesses under the guise of indiscriminate "penalties."

[RedBar]

I don't see how the topic is advancing our knowledge of how to use Google on a day-to-day basis.

For most of us it is totally impossible to SEO and USE Google these days since it is evidently out of control/broken. Wouldn't it be oh-so-nice for them to get back under control however their soothing words are simply that, they are pacifiers, no more, no less.

I worked with Google on their original algo in the 90s, I was headhunted by them, I knew how it worked, the basics of it are still there BUT at some black and white point, they lost total control of the results even though they believed they were doing right.

I have absolutely no doubt that they do actually mean well, unfortunately they also have absolutely no idea of the mayhem they have created, people with lots of money NEVER understand the crap they have sprayed whilst they are fine-dining.

I have witnessed an entire global industry turn its back on Google since 90% of the time it returns two results in its SERPs, two trade directories which are, for the vast majority, totally and utterly useless for the "average" surfer.

After 20 years of site construction, 10 years and 20,000+ posts here under various monickers, I can honestly say that Google has now made my life a total freakin' MISERY.

It IS the archetypal scraper, it does not reward MANY sites for the fantastic quality they put forth and, worst of all, penalises so many sites without telling them, in THEIR opinion, why! What? G isn't even the CREATOR of all this stuff, they are the scraper, the aggregator, without US they would not even be able to exist!

It is absolutely totally and utterly ludicrous madness. Believe what you like EG, it ain't going to happen...G, quite simply, does not care about you, me nor anyone else.

[EditorialGuy]

EG, the fundamental purpose of MANY MANY searches online is to find the best service or product provider - or at least, a very good service or product provider.

Sure, but that doesn't mean Google's algorithm is about ranking businesses. It isn't. It's about ranking Web pages and Web sites. (That may be one reason why Amazon does so well: Its product pages are often jammed with user reviews that give Google content to crawl, index, and rank. Amazon may or may not be the best source of a widget or a thingamajig, but it's often a great source of user feedback and support tips for those items.)

Google isn't Consumer Reports, a global version of Angie's List, or the Better Business Bureau. It has enough trouble ranking Web pages without taking on the additional task of figuring out how to rank sites based on a combination of prices, customer service, shipping times, shipping fees, percentage of items in stock at any given time, and whether the owner is legit or is selling the customer's credit-card data to the Mafia.

IMHO, when Matt Cutts says that a "Googler" is working on making Panda friendlier to small Web sites and small businesses, his words need to be interpreted in the context of what Google Search is--and of its limitations. A small incremental change in the Google algorithm isn't going to change the nature of Google Search, but if Littleguy.com is already in the top 10 or 20 results for a query, a change of a few places could make a big difference in traffic and revenues for that query. (Many of us saw that happen--in a negative way--after Panda's "brand boost," which affected informational queries and not just commercial searches.)

Bottom line: Have reasonable expectations, and it's always possible that you'll be pleasantly surprised. Expect a sea change, and you're likely to be disappointed.

[turbocharged]

After 20 years of site construction, 10 years and 20,000+ posts here under various monickers, I can honestly say that Google has now made my life a total freakin' MISERY.

Redbar, if you recall Matt Cutts mentioned something about breaking black hatters spirits by frustrating them to the point of stopping what they are doing. Barry Schwartz quoted some of the words in Matt's video [twit.tv...] which states:

If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on.

Apply Google's same spirit breaking algorithm to organics. Panda, Penguin, EMD, Above the Fold, etc. all have created a hostile environment for innocent small businesses that inflict:

"so much pain and anguish and frustration, they just focus on Adwords from now on." That's my interpretation of what Google is doing to small businesses.

I'm sorry to have seen a lot of good people and great websites drowning in misery as well. The common denominator in these cases is not that these owners participated in link spam or stuffed their pages with keywords, but they are small, unknown and easy targets that Google is trying to convert into Adwords users by denying them visibility in organics.

[goodoldweb]

^ perfectly put!

Google is now simply the enemy as far as i am concerned. They are actively (and openly) engaged in obscuring my web properties from showing to my prospective clients for absolutely no reason other then good old ransom!

[brotherhood of LAN]

A gentle reminder from the forum charter:

Generic editorializing, whether pro or con, may be removed. We're not here just to vent, we're here to help each other understand. The noise level that editorializing creates makes it difficult to filter through threads for information of real value.

IMO, I think if you can't see Google as something that will benefit you, your time is best spent elsewhere.