An article by Clint Boulton at eWeek.com covers Google’s reaction to a story published in the Wall Street Journal on December 12 that many startup companies are accusing Google of favoring its own results over those of the businesses who rely on Google results to generate business and provide decent search rankings.
Representatives from TripAdvisor.com, WebMD.com, Yelp.com and Citysearch.com are all complaining that Google tends to promote links to its own services that are similar to the services they provide.

For example, they say, Google has boosted the profile of its Google Places local search directory. The lettered “pins” on any local search are typically sites listed with Google Places, and found within its Place Search Service.

If your company is on the map, of course, and you’re one of the lettered locations on the map, you will rank higher than other businesses in your area that don’t. By favoring their own sites, outside companies say Google is “stacking the deck” and making it harder for people to find results from the startups, which are now frequently found either at the bottom of page one or even on page 2.

The Times article reports that TripAdvisor.com recently reported a 10% drop in visits via Google-based searches. This caused the company to stage a symbolic protest by blocking Google from accessing its information at all for a short time.

Google, on the other hand, says this is not an attempt to dig into the fortunes of its competitors, but rather to simply get information to people as quickly as possible.

Boulton cites Google’s December 13 blog post, in which Google’s Carter Maslan, defends Google’s stance on Places and Pages over its competition:

“When people come to Google looking for information about places like restaurants, shoe stores, parks or museums, our goal is to provide them with answers as quickly as possible and presented in a way that’s easy to read and understand.”

This “customers first” attitude is not artificial. Google has a point. There’s no law against improving your product and trying to use new technologies to expand your brand. Every business on the web does that. Since Google is a private company, it needs to turn a profit. Google Pages and Google Places are designed to make searchers happy, not companies.

Plus, it’s not like Google is completely ignoring the startups. Pages and Places are just as likely to present information culled from those startup sites as it will from its own – whatever gets the information to the searcher the fastest.

Boulton compares this current round of complaints to the recent attempt by FairSearch.org to stop Google’s proposed bid of ITA travel software. FairSearch.org believed that Google taking over the world’s largest provider of ticket travel software would create a virtual monopoly of that information on the web.

This really isn’t a fair comparison, however. While FairSearch.org probably has a point, with Places, Google is simply using the promotional power it has to promote its own products on its own site. That may not sit well with competition, but for once, you can’t blame Google. It’s the way of free enterprise.

See the highlighted section below which illustrates the only 2 above-fold (varies by industry) organic listings left for this particular query.  The next 7 listings are Google Places listings.

You may have also noticed the heavy advertising Google is doing to promote “Tags”, (See the yellow sponsored section in the image above, and the example ad below).

I don’t know how many businesses will end up buying tags, but Google is obviously betting that many will.

In short, Google has found another method for monetizing their search engine. It goes like this.  Replace most of the organic listings with “Google Places” listings and than offer a flat fee to place a highlighted tag/ad.

]]> http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/2010/11/google-places-no-place-left-for-local-organic-listings/feed/ 0 http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/2010/10/google-ains-ground-bing-yahoo-results-flat-after-merger-experian-hitwise-says/ http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/2010/10/google-ains-ground-bing-yahoo-results-flat-after-merger-experian-hitwise-says/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:19:08 +0000 admin http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/?p=526 The month of September saw nearly 75% of all searches in the U.S. conducted by Google, according to a recent report from Experian Hitwise.

In his article “Google Rules Online Search Market In September,” Surojit Chatterjee, a contributing blogger for International Business Times, says the report showed a… Continue reading...

True, Google Instant helped Google to see an average of 20% higher click through rates in the first month, which in turn led to a 4% increase in PPC clicks. Total PPC spending was up 18% over the previous quarter, but Google Instant’s late entry into the market is hardly the reason why.

We couldn’t help but notice that once the heat died down on Instant, everything was pretty much back to normal. Within two weeks of Google Instant’s release, it had gone from being the talk of the industry to yesterday’s news. People who should have known better in the first place suddenly came around to the realization that Instant was not a monkey wrench in the SEO machinery, but simply a useful tool that speeds things up a bit.

It did not, as Google confirmed in a press release, goof with your SEO search dollar. It wasn’t ranking partial keywords. Amazingly, Google wasn’t trying to disrupt the flow of making money. Imagine that.

It’s interesting how many expert bloggers – the people we read every day and rely upon for great SEO information – can get so bent out of shape about everything Google does. It sometimes appears that the pundits literally think that everything Google puts out is a blatant attempt to upset the status quo.

Obviously, a business model like that wouldn’t make any sense. Why would one of the world’s biggest companies –a company with enough challenging problems on its hands, such as having to pull its service away from China, the world’s most populous country—try to further bite the hand that feeds it by turning SEO upside down?

Short answer: They wouldn’t. And they won’t.

What the general reaction to Google Instant will be in another month or a year remains to be seen. That is, if anybody even cares once the next “major” Google change comes out.

While one critic, Tom Krazit at Cnet.com, calls the change “Google’s decision to fix what wasn’t broken,” he admits that the change is a “bold bet” on the future of search. And if people like it, which Kraznit seems reluctant to think that they will, this could “cement its reputation as a search innovator.”

The change appears to be an attempt by Google to provide answers as fast – if not faster, than updates from Twitter and other real-time services. This, says Yvonne Bell at Search Engine Journal, will help to take both speed and guesswork out of search.

Google’s own blog post about Google Instant calls it “search-before-you-type,” which isn’t far from the truth. A demonstration video on the site shows how the results can change literally letter by letter in virtually milliseconds.

On the blog post, Google also lists the core features adapted to Google Instant:

Dynamic Results: What you see is always relevant to what you’re typing and changes word for word.

Predictions: An advancement of Google’s assumptive search capability, it now predicts the rest of your search term in light gray text. If that’s what you’re looking for, there’s no need to continue typing.

Scroll to scratch: If Google pulls up several possible “predictions for your search, you can scroll through them to get to the one you want faster.

There is a definite fun factor to Google Instant, as Helen Popkin at msnbc’s Technology discovered. She says to type a “Where is” query , for example. It instantly brings up “Where is Chuck Norris?”, Where is my refund,” and several other search results, all before you’ve clicked a thing.

“Start typing who, what, where, when, why or how into the Google search field,” Popkin writes. “If you’re feeling lucky, follow it with a verb. Lickety-split, the top questions most commonly asked by Google users pop up — instant access into the bizarrely awesome zeitgeist experienced by Google users.”

While Popkin finds Google Instant somewhat “creepy,” and needs getting used to, she asks, “but what are you gonna do – use Bing?”
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If you are not yet seeing Google instant you can go to this link to enable it. Google says it will take a few days for it to be the default search method for users

In his article “The Google Sewage Factory, In Action: The Chocomize Story,” Sullivan relates how an innocent visit to Google Trends turned up something that he thought was very fishy. Finding the word “Chocomize” in the top ten Hot Searches one day, he noticed that this term, actually the name of a custom chocolate bar maker, had in fact spiked, causing many observers to wonder why. The Google trends page turned up a list of sites suddenly mentioning Chocomize. Upon closer inspection, he saw that the first listed site really had nothing to do with Chocomize or chocolate, but had merely added content about Chocomize. This caused Google AdSense to place PPC ads for two chocolate sellers on the page.

The second page listed in the search results, Sullivan says, was even more blatant. Supposedly a list of news articles, the site is merely another list trying to ride Chocomize’s trending.

Ultimately, Sullivan discovered that what got the Chocomize frenzy going was a CNN article listed in Google News that probably coincided with a CNN TV report about Chocomize. Companies saw the spike in searches for the company and jumped on, adding content about Chocomize just to ride the popularity bandwagon for as long as the wave lasted. Google, Sullivan said, allowed this to go on without so much as a warning to cease and desist.

Sullivan calls Google’s “pollution” of its own Google News “ridiculous…we get ‘news’ sites that have been admitted (by) just jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article.”

Sullivan wonders why Google doesn’t appear willing to change its policies. He implies the reluctance may be due to the fact that all these extra links to PPC ads are earning Google more money.

This is just a quick update for all of you who haven’t seen it yet.

Google has announced the release of a new link discovery tool. You can now log into your Webmaster Central Account to retrieve a comprehensive list of all your backlinks.

Search Engine Land has already covered this in depth so I wont duplicate efforts here.

Rand over at SEOmoz has already run “total link count” comparisons between Yahoo’s Site Explorer and the new Google tool, and results are very promising. Yahoo and Google are now showing similar results.

But one disclaimer for all of you professional link builders out there. You can only view links for sites that you own, so this new tool has no value for competitive intelligence.

This is not a new conspiracy theory. Here are just a couple of posts from the past three years.

Christmas 2003

Christmas 2004 – http://battellemedia.com/archives/001018.php

The “Google is Evil” people believe that it makes perfect sense for Google to shift rankings in order to make millions in additional revenue during the holiday season.

The “Google is Good (mostly)” crowd tends to believe that Google not only does’nt do this, but that they lack the ability to do it. Something about being two different departments or something.

I for one think Google is “mostly” harmless. They mean well right? I mean who else gives us great aps like Spreadsheet and Reader for free. Who else provides us with free analytics so that we can accuratly track how much more we should be spending in adwords, right?

And just because they have access to millions of websites analytics data, they would never use that information to “make more money”, right?

And here it goes……

My Prediction is that we will see some major shifts in the SERPS by the end of this month.

Now Google has Teamed with Digg to provide Google users Digg results as a supplemental section of your personalized SERP pages.

This is a feature that may actually finally convince me to login to “Google Personal” on a regular basis.

Here is a link to the Digg Story http://www.digg.com/links/Digg_Google_Co-op_Now_Live_

And here is a screenshot:

Many in the industry have speculated on what this could mean. Will this transform Google yet again? Or, will it merely be just another piece of technology they buy but don’t appear to use.

In this article, I look at the implications of Orion and what it could mean to the future of search.

In order to understand the issues at play, we must first understand just what the heck Google bought.

Orion is a new algorithm in which a nutshell works like Ask or Clusty in that it will not only match results based on keywords but also similar results based on concepts around those keywords.

For example, if you were to search for “Canada” you may get not only the Government of Canada website, but also websites dealing with history, sites talking about the official languages of Canada (there are two official languages in case you were wondering) and more.

Similar to how Ask allows you to drill up or down to narrow or broaden your search.

Many people feel that Orion will “revolutionize” Google. And, while it will be interesting to see what Google does with the technology, I’m more inclined to agree with Danny Sullivan’s assessment. In a recent article he basically says “So what?”

Mind you, I don’t think this is as ho-hum an issue as Danny makes it out to be. However, I also don’t think it’s as huge a deal as others have made it.

For example, Danny says, “When Google acquired the three people from Kaltix along with their search technology back in 2003, it hardly created a revolutionary change for us soon after.” And I’d have to disagree with him.

While the results of the Kaltix acquisition weren’t immediately obvious, they did show up, at least partly, a little later on in the “update from hell” as many webmasters still call it today. It was also known as the Florida Update.

I do agree with this assessment also made by Danny in the article: “It sounds like Allon mainly developed an algorithm useful in pulling out better summaries of web pages.”

Because, the way I see it, that is all this is: A way to make the search experience a little more useful.

Will this revolutionize search?

I don’t think so. But it does do a couple of things for Google:

For one, it makes it easier for users to find the data they want on Google. Which, in turn, improves loyalty to the engine ultimately increasing the company’s bottom line.

And another big reason for the purchase? To keep the technology out of the hands of the competition. Namely, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

So what will Orion do for search?

Well, as I mentioned, it will make it easier to find information on Google. For example, if you can’t find what you want in the immediate results, if you can scan some related terms to find other terms which could match what you are looking for and then view results there, it can help.

Also, look at what such a search does to the searcher. No longer does the searcher hit a result and leave the engine. Now, they could spend longer on the engine, potentially reviewing more results and obviously being exposed to more ads.

In reality, while this is a nice bell or whistle, the only one who’s really going to benefit is Google. That’s because it increases ad exposures; meaning that more ads get seen, which means a greater chance of an ad being clicked on.

Will the average person use it?

n all honesty I doubt it. I think it’s a tool guys like me will use. You know the type – always into the latest and greatest (if buggy) things. Those things that have a coolness factor.

But, in reality the average person doesn’t care about these types of gimics. They just want the search engine to show them the right result every time. If you force users to hunt for the right results, you risk them switching engines until they find what they’re looking for.

Therefore, the average user will probably say “hmm that’s interesting, but what I really want to see better be in the top 2 or 3 results.”

In the end Orion will do a couple of things for Google. It will add some new functionality that some will (but most won’t) use, and it ensures that Microsoft and Yahoo! have to build the technology to remain competitive.

In the end, Danny was mostly right: Google gets another good employee and the technology may give them “another evolutionary change that may improve things over time, rather than instantly.”

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.