91–100 of 115 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In principle, I'd agree that relying on another company is not a sound business strategy, but Google has a virtual stranglehold on organic traffic to websites, something that is outside the control of most web companies. How do you suggest a web-based company should counter that and not rely on google for much of their business?
Marketing? You know, advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc.
;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In principle, I'd agree that relying on another company is not a sound business strategy, but Google has a virtual stranglehold on organic traffic to websites, something that is outside the control of most web companies. How do you suggest a web-based company should counter that and not rely on google for much of their business?
Marketing? You know, advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc.
So they open up their browser, type portrait quilts in the address bar, which redirects to a search, and your website is on page 8 despite being an exact match on the search. Game Over.
Seems your other channels are not quite as effective as you thought if google decides to penalise or blacklist your site. If you're off page 1 or 2 you may as well not exist. Of course from Google's point of view, you'll just have to advertise with google, so this doesn't penalise them at all, in fact they are rewarded monetarily for arbitrarily shifting rankings periodically (not that I'm suggesting that they go out of their way to do this, just that the perverse incentive is there).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say I own a single store and it happens to be in a space in a mall. Also, the mall is letting me do business there for free. I get exposure, electricity, easy access, all kinds of good stuff, for free. (The mall is Google) Suddenly the mall wants to extort me by charging me money to use their space, electricity, water, etc. Those jerks!
Completely missing the problem. The problem i'm talking about is more in the case of some company distributing a large phonebook for the city, which includes all stores and people, information they gathered by downloading public city records. So people start using this phonebook all the time, and for most citizens, it's the only way they can find your business. But on day the phonebook company, decides for an uknown…
"This is how she makes her living, selling on the web and through photo stores." "She founded PC Data, the largest PC market research firm, now part of the NPD Group." She founded the largest PC market research firm and now she has to make a living making quilts? How did that happen? Wouldn't the bigger story be how she lost all her money (which I'm assuming) running a PC market research firm?
She has to make her living != She makes her living. Maybe she just likes making photo quilts and found a niche market that allowed for a sustainable business that was now ruined. Isn't that what we'd all like to do: Earn enough money so that we can work in a job we like, even if that doesn't pay as much as we'd need to live?
And apparently Mr Cringely doesn't know anything about Webmaster Tools, which would probably be the first stop of anyone wanting to know about a sudden change in rank. Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction' so I'm guessing that somewhere there was an action. Did she succumb to some black hat SEO marketing pitch? Did Cringely piss off some black hat SEO person? Did her site get comp…
A quick 2-minute check shows that yes, indeed the site violates Google guidelines. If you check the backlinks using any number of checkers (Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO) you can find a number of over-optimized 'unnatural' backlinks residing on spammy link-exchange pages in clear violation of Google's guidelines. The only reason to place links on these pages would be to try to rise higher in Google's searc…
http://www.bobmarketing.com/links/page_Business_Marketing_17...
http://stardir.info/stardir/subcategory.asp?IDsubcate=494&of...
http://www.cyberpathway.com/cgi-bin/recip/internet/recip.cgi
The majority of the backlink profile is made up of self made low quality directory links.
It's possible that the Penguin algorithm has realized this and as a result is not trusting links to the site. But, it's also possible that Google has just gotten better at not counting this type of link when it comes to ranking. It's also possible that the site is under a manual penalty (which would be evident by looking at the Webmaster Tools manual spam action tool.)
When I look at the site's keyword positions on semrush.com, it appears that the rankings started a gradual decline as of May 2013. There was a Penguin refresh on May 23, so this is certainly a possibility. If the site is affected by Penguin, then in order to make the algorithm trust the site again, she's going to have to disavow each of the links that are self made. If there are good, truly natural links in the profile then she stands a chance of ranking well again. But, the likelihood is that the site won't get back to the previous rankings by just clearing up the backlinks because those rankings were not deserved in the first place.
It's not Google's fault that this site is not ranking well now. But, one could argue that it was Google's heavy reliance on links and on a system that could be scammed that allowed this site to reign for the time that it did.
I see a lot of these articles; someone feeling cheated because Google takes them off some or all search results. Google did not "mug" anyone - it is the reason for your traffic to begin with. The fact that you even ever had discoverability among a billion or so websites is a beautiful thing. Additionally, have some perspective, the search is a free tool that is very tough to get right. This might sound harsh, but I b…
>it is the reason for your traffic to begin with No, people searching for "photo quilts" are the reason for the traffic. Most of those people happen to be using Google, but if Google disappeared, they would switch to another search engine. The site owner has a legitimate interest in Google doing its job better, and so do we as Google users. The point of this post is that Google isn't serving anyone's interests proper…
I'm not sure about that. When I search for "photo quilts", I find plenty of relevant sites. They seem to be at least as good as www.portraitquilts.com.
I would say Google is doing a fine job serving it's user's interests.
It might just be that www.portraitquilts.com isn't as relevant as the other results.
I see a lot of these articles; someone feeling cheated because Google takes them off some or all search results. Google did not "mug" anyone - it is the reason for your traffic to begin with. The fact that you even ever had discoverability among a billion or so websites is a beautiful thing. Additionally, have some perspective, the search is a free tool that is very tough to get right. This might sound harsh, but I b…
In one sense you are correct that Google is "free" because one does not pay cash directly to Google to be listed in its results or to preform a search. But in another sense, Google is not free at all. The fact is, Google lives and thrives off of the data generated by the public. Yes, Google employees smart people. But its real value is derived from the underlying public data that Google gets- for free. Google search…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marketing? You know, advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc.
Many of those channels rely on guiding people to search engines, or at the very least being findable on search engines by name. To take this example, your website is called portrait quilts, the url is http://portraitquilts.com/ - so you do loads of advertising on twitter, print media, word of mouth etc, and people try to find your site. You can try to guide them to a unique url, but often people won't remember urls,…