It is a real crumby Saturday today. The skies are dark and it is piss pouring rain out so my neighborhood BBQ is not happening. I have spent the last 2 days preparing my patented recipe for ribs. I have decided I am going for it anyways and have put up a beer tent in my back yard. I am not going to let Mother Nature pee on my parade.
I wanted o talk about one of the most hypocritical search engines on the planet “Google”. I have been online since 1998 and have witnessed Google’s relentless domination in the search engine market. There is no doubt they are the most gamed search engine out there. With that come the most ruthless algorithms. Justifiably so, I guess.
In 2004 many of my websites crashed and were pooped out of Google’s anal cavity. Up until then I had always liked Google and believed thier claim of honestly. I don’t take anything online too personally and am diversified enough to make it happen any which way. I have business ventures that I am involved with on and offline. There are many that are not that fortunate and rely on 100% of their income from the net. I truly have sympathy for webmasters that are suffering from the Google schoolyard bullying blues. I am sorry but it is difficult to see them as anything else but a bully in the school yard. The reason I write this article today is to offer some substance behind my statement “Bully in a schoolyard”.
The Google Puppet
Matt Cutts is a Google engineer that talks from both sides of his mouth. Read what he says with caution. While he can offer some valuable insight he is also a major part of the algorithms developed. Much of the programming logic comes from what he learns from people that comment back on his blog and Google’s. The programming at Google is clever and getting more difficult to appeal to (SEO) as a result of Google’s engineering brilliance and collection of data that helps formulate new algos or tweaks to existing one.
- Paid links- Don’t buy or sell links. Read what Matt says about buying and selling links. I can see why Google may take this stance in terms of manipulating rankings, but they are quick to take advertising dollars from AdWord advertisers selling links for that purpose. I come from a family of 4 children and am the oldest. It has always been expected for me to lead by example. It seems Google doesn’t practice what they preach. They are the big brother on the net c’mon man, but fail miserably when it comes to leading by example.
- Cloaking- Most webmasters know that if you get caught cloaking Google will ban you from their index. When you search Google for “get cloaking software” have a look at all the advertiser’s Google is advertising for.
- Duplicate content- Google has been online since 1998 and has been serving up duplicate content from then to now. If you search Google where do you think they get all their content? Simple, by scrapping our sites (without our permission) and displaying it SERPS (search engine result pages)
Webmasters are Starting to Lash-out
Google is currently under investigation by U.S. Federal Trade Commission. There is a new buzz in the air about webmaster’s taking action. I do not necessarily agree with boycotting Google only because it will never happen. What I do agree with is fighting back in an executable manner!! When I say fighting, you may not agree with the term but you are competing with millions of others trying to attain the same result. This thread makes some very good points indeed. The truth is, whether you like it or not, they do have the power to turn off your search engine traffic in the bat of an eyelash. On the other hand, when a search engine has the market share that Google does they need to take precautions against being the most gamed by SEO’s and spammers. I personally think that their algos are well advanced beyond those of any of the other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN.
Google’s Perpetual Bung Hole
I believe that Google has developed one of the largest bung holes for pooping out websites from there index for reasons that require NO EXPLANATIONS. Fundamentally that is wrong. If you are a 100% revenue based online business…you’re done!! One of the secrets to not falling prey to these ruthless algos is to always be looking into the future with the assumption that you will be pooped out one day. Start today, making plans for your future without the aid of Google traffic. The cold hard truth is Google does not have to answer to anyone including the US government. At the end of the day it is you that must stand beside yourself and do what is necessary to make it work so your children are healthy. You can pretty well assume that if you are 1 of the millions of websites that has been passed through the overworked sphincter of Google there is no legal recourse or no prescribed solution for you that is guaranteed to work. It is a fact of conducting business online. There is no guarantee for a tomorrow unless you take action today.
Another Banned Google Story
I want to share an experience I had in November 2004 that lead to a ban on one of my biggest sites. We hired an outsourced company to build a streamlined ordering system on this site. I accepted three bids on this project and awarded a web design company from India with the contract. I paid %50 upfront and the work began. The scope was clear and deadline was agreed to be 3 months from the start of the project. December, January, February, March flew by and this company was not even close to completion. Additionally when the first draft was submitted it was obvious that they were using another clients programming template. My draft contained the company name and 1-800 number of their original client. The lines of communication broke down and they stopped responding to my requests for a project update. I dug really deep to find the cell phone number of the project co-coordinator. I called him and explained my concerns. He replied with “The balance of the project costs needed to be paid IN FULL before they could proceed any further”. I replied “But, but you are way behind, through no fault of my own, and this project is quickly becoming out-of-date programming.” There was no option he explained. I reluctantly agreed and paid the bill in full. April, May, June and July go by and we are still not close to completion. At this point I knew there was a problem and was very pissed of at their service and communication skill (lack thereof). I was at the end of the road and knew that this was not going to work out. The problem was they had ALL my money, I had nothing and they were absolutely not going to refund a dime. After numerous attempts to resolve this with this company it became obvious that there was NO WAY they were going to work this out with me. I contacted my credit card company and initiated a well defined chargeback. I ended up get 40% of my money back and still had nothing usable from them. Unfortunately the balance was paid by certified money order so I could not get that back.
What this company decided to do in spite of my 40% chargeback was hack through my server, broadcast spam to themselves and report me to the Spam authorities such as Google. Quickly my name became mud. They accepted this, with evidence of the source code of the emails which displayed my IP in the header. There we were, Alexa ranked @ 50,000, Top 10 ranking in desired terms, fulfilling a volume of business and making $500-1000/ day in AdSense revenue to a big fat $1-2/ day and manually banned or removed from Google Serps.
The owner of this company (weprintcolor.com) had appointed me to be the project co-coordinator to insure the objectives and deadlines were met. Following this project I was consequently let go. I don’t blame Robert (owner of WePrintColor), I blame this fly-by-night firm (Ishir). Working at WePrintColor was one of the best jobs I ever had. It was fun, challenging and creative. Because of the outcome of this project I was out of a job…a good job. Because I was tight with Robert he made my termination rewarding in that he paid for my start-up costs in my own business and suggested a road to travel. Robert actually felt that I was destined to be self-employed and convinced me that this was the next logical step for me. Three years later, I am doing great. I still have a sour taste in my mouth about the web firm’s way of handling this and the Google’s ban of this website without any investigation at all. I know that Robert has given up on filing reinclusion requests. After 3 years the site remains banned even after a complete (expensive) facelift.
My Approach Today is Simple…Do not Include Google Traffic in your Planning
Many of the ventures that I am now involved in are very successful but do not factor Google into the business plan. If the Google algos like what I am doing it is a bonus, if not nothing lost nothing gained. In my view Google is sucken and blowen at the same time. Their market share puts them in a totally dominant position to not have to answer to anyone. As a child, most of us were raised to understand consequence, which provides one of the greatest learning blocks. Google has no consequence or authority to answer to, really. Most webmasters that have been flat lined by Google are also sick of submitting reinclusion requests that fall on deaf ears or getting referred to the Google Webmaster Blog to dig for your own answer.
3 Possible Ways to Unfairly Get a Competitor Banned:
- Follow the recipe above it seems to have worked perfectly
- Use form spam bots annoyingly, that have your competition’s website in the body of email. Recipients will complain to authorities and your competitor’s site may be banned
- Join a link network and “link bomb” them
The reason I mention this is to illustrate that even Google’s algos are flawed. As I said earlier I take nothing personal on the web. When your web-based livelihood has become affected as mine was in 2004 maybe it’s time to change the way you are doing things.
We must keep in mind that we are all pebbles of sand that make up the beach that Google patrols. Without the sand there is no beach!
Regards,
J
