I decided the algo updates (aka "Panda" and "Penguin") have nothing to do with improving the quality of the results.
I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear me rant for an hour, so I will sum it up this way instead:
Google is a business.
The business of Google makes money primarily through ads (PPC).
SEO does not make Google money.
Big sites with big money paid SEO companies to rank them organically with SEO.
Google sees SEO as competition for PPC.
Google knows websites with lots of links have lots of money to spend on marketing.
Google came up with a plan to get that money.
Google devalued sites with lots of links.
The sites that lost organic rankings lost traffic.
These sites need traffic.
Sites use what once was their organic SEO budget on PPC with Google instead.
Google pockets all the cash.
Google continues to feed the public with confusing propaganda regarding SEO.
Google improves free tools to aid in PPC management.
Google inundates website owners with free ad coupons.
Google has no problem serving your website up in the paid listings even if you were penalized organically.
More sites decide to use PPC instead of SEO for website traffic.
Google pockets more cash.
Quality websites are nowhere to be found in the organic rankings.
Crappy websites that have no budgets for SEO or PPC remain untouched.
Google claims they have penalized sites for breaking their terms.
Google wins.
SEO loses.
Jenny moves to Bing. (half kidding)
Blah.
8 comments:
I missed the "Tin foil hats" requirement before reading this one :-)
I'm not sure I personally agree with this - the worse they make the organic SERP, the more likely people will bail out and that will in turn harm the PPC, so wouldn't it be shooting themselves in the foot to take this approach?
Maybe it's like you say, or maybe not. Maybe it's something in the middle - balancing the two agendas.
Just my take...
Hi Alan - You didn't catch the "Warning" at the beginning? Ahhh, I did forget the tin foil hat requirement, LOL... This is clearly not a comprehensive piece, a small and somewhat angry rant - but my point: If people think that all of these crazy algo updates and simply to improve the SERPS then they are sadly mistaken. They are strategically aligning the algo with what will allow for more advertising opportunities. I work with 100's of clients and so I have the opportunity to see pretty clear trends. To me, it is clear that plenty of sites that were hit with the algo updates had (have) legitimate websites, clean SEO and many never even purchased a link. These people were forced to buy PPC or take a chance of losing their business. I'm not saying many sites that were hit didn't deserve it - but even so, Google created an organic algo that forced you to get links to rank. Once SEO's started dominating the SERP's Google could see that website owners didn't have to spend their marketing budgets on PPC ad's. SEO was taking money out of Google's pockets! They had to do something about that! Google is a money hungry business and it's clear they will do what it takes to make sure their main source of income is not taken over by something they can control....
Now to your point of shooting themselves in the foot - I get it, it would be stupid! And that is why I think every time they have rolled out a huge algo change that dramatically impacted the SERP's, they put out a lot of confusing data and blog posts and then dialed it back a bit over the next few months. So, anyone who was big time impacted would already be on to PPC and those that weren't as impacted would have continued their marketing as usual, so when they started to climb again, they would be able to attribute it to the continued marketing efforts. Those that lost their business are now gone and SEO's and Google alike could have blamed it on a number of things the website owner must have done wrong.
I could go on and on, but that's just what I see.
Nice sum up!
I even agree about moving out of Google for personal stuff...going to be hard for me to stop using Gmail though, but I think I'm going to think harder about how to make it possible. Their days of not being evil have definitely ended. The world needs to say we're done with Google and move on to something better - but that's going to be really hard cuz they offer up so many free services and people just can't pass up free!
Thanks for sharing Interesting post. Thanks for taking this opportunity to discuss this, I appreciate with this and I like learning about this subject.
Regards,
seo company melbourne
Google does what is in "their best interest"....as we all do. They tell us that what is in "their best interest" is to provide a sensational experience for their users. This becomes a conflict when you get dinged on the organic side because it is not a "quality experience" for the user but it OK to put the same paid content up in Adwords. We all need to keep reinventing.
Google does what is in their best interest.....as do we all. ;-)
Google does same as a business should do. Google knows that if seo provide top ranking to all businesses then how can google earn. This is right google is not doing social service. After all google has to pay lot to googles staff. You can say this is google's GOOGLY.
New York SEO Company
Yes Google clearly partiality with seo. Google says every work of seo are spam then what is remaining for for to do. Its cleary indicate that Google promote itself PPC service to earn more..... Because Google no more benefit from seo sites, thats why google continuously devalued of seo sites and down their rankings!
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