by Frank Reed at marketingpilgrim.com
It appears as if it’s not just the poor businesses in Europe but now sites of all different kinds that have a funny view of Google as a search engine. I say funny because they apparently have decided that in order to get ranked (or retain rankings that they have lost) they need to implement the latest technique in SEO which is complaining about fair treatment from Google.
An article in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend reports
Google Inc. increasingly is promoting some of its own content over that of rival websites when users perform an online search, prompting competing sites to cry foul.
The Internet giant is displaying links to its own services—such as local-business information or its Google Health service—above the links to other, non-Google content found by its search engine.
The complaints are coming from some big players which makes this whole thing all the more interesting.
Those companies say their links are being pushed lower on the results page to make room for the Google sites. Critics include executives at travel site TripAdvisor.com, health site WebMD.com and local-business reviews sites Yelp.com and Citysearch.com, among others.
“There is no denying that today Google is competing [with many websites] for the same Web traffic and the same advertising dollars,” said Jay Herratti, chief executive of CityGrid Media, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp. that owns Citysearch and sister sites Urbanspoon.com and InsiderPages.com.
These cries of foul are coming from sites that for years have been getting the bulk of their traffic from Google. Now that Google has made some significant changes in how they present information, especially in the local space, the big sites in the Google index are crying foul. And, rather than work to figure out how Google is doing this and what exactly Google is looking for, they are reverting to the same trick that kids do when they have something taken from them which is to whine.
TripAdvisor LLC Chief Executive Stephen Kaufer said the traffic his site gets from Google’s search engine dropped by more than 10%, on a seasonally adjusted basis, since mid-October—just before Google announced the latest change to the way its search engine shows information about local businesses. TripAdvisor.com, whose top source of traffic is Google, reviews hotels and other businesses frequented by travelers.
OK class, let’s go over this again. Google is a company not a government agency. They can do whatever they want to do and there is literally no basis for anyone to cry foul if they feel they are not being treated the way they should be. Personally, I am glad that Google doesn’t simply serve up a list of information aggregators (most of whom are just glorified directories of some nature really). People go to Google for direct information and being passed off to another source that requires more search to get to the answer is a bad result for a Google user.
