Google Pay-To Play and Organic Search

[enlytend]

Great blog post illustrating the dismal state of Google's so-called "search" as it is today.

, if you are in ecommerce & you don't rank #1 you are essentially invisible to most searchers.

Full post

Smart strategy for Google or are they shooting themselves in the foot?

 

[south]

Smart strategy for Google or are they shooting themselves in the foot?

The herd continues to follow.

 

[enlytend]

I was fine with their "quality content" improvements, but this business of pushing eveyone except paid search, paid product placements (and in most cases the same few big brands) out of sight for most searches is obnoxious.

(Oh and if YOU pay for or "manipulate" links/placements you get slapped (maybe they'll try to get you to spend hours of your time deleting links even though they may be helping you on other search engines,) but if you pay GOOGLE for placement, it's obviously high-quality and you get rewarded. Double-standard, much?)

It's good if you ARE a big brand. Not bad to be a local business either - local businesses can still get good exposure if you're well optimized for local (at least for now.)

If you're a small, online business, especially in travel, hotels or a competitive ecomm, lotsa luck.

New on my To Do List: strip Google Analytics from my own sites and replace with an open source product (I don't like their attitude, I think I don't want to give them my data.)

 

[thappe]

With every new move they make, you have to wonder how any small business online can afford to compete any more.

 

[Steve Markson]

Google changes are now as like daily task for me. When i try to learn something new which has Google updated that moment i saw Google already do some changes again in that. I always got surprised with Google's changes.