Poor Google! At times, you just got to feel sort of sorry for them. Now that they are mega-successful and a major player in the online economy, they have also become a target for every wacko, wierdo, crook and scumbag out there hoping to make a quick buck!
I just read (on Search Engine Roundtable) that:
“Late Friday news came down that Google has been sued by KinderStart.com, a parental advice site, for being demoted in the search rankings. KinderStart is trying to create a class action lawsuit for all Web site owners who have been blacklisted by Google since January 2001.”
Geeze, what a pathetic attempt at getting some free publicity. I am quite sure they are hoping all the other google whingers, haters & complainers out there will jump on the bandwagon and put their hand up to join a frivilous class action.
America TRULY IS the land of the lawsuit in preference to taking responsibility for one’s actions.
While I don’t worship Google or anything silly (hey, some of my sites don’t get much action from Google, but I don’t bitch about it), I just am blown away with how many moaners & complainers there are out there, blaming Google for all their woes.
For pete’s sake people, let’s get a grip on reality here and remember that there are plenty of other SEs to optimise for AS WELL AS offline marketing.
The way I look at it, ANY free traffic I get from Google, Yahoo & MSN is a gift, not a right! If I don’t like them, I can take my site/s out of their indexes, and I am welcome to find other ways to get traffic to my site, just the same as the offline world does now and has done for hundreds of years!
Grow up all you babies and deal with it!!! 
Hey there Website Owner, I just have a quick question for you…
While I realise you are ranking well for some of your main keywords on MSN & Yahoo, how are you doing for that and other more appropriate keywords on Google?
The traffic you’ll get for high rankings on Google will be more than Yahoo & MSN added together and then some, so it’s MUCH MORE value-for-money in terms of pursuing high Search Engine ranking results on Google than the #2 & #3 Search engines offer.
According to the statistics I’ve recently read, Google has nearly 81% of ALL the search engine traffic in Australia (and is similarly high in many other countries), which gives you an idea of how much traffic you are currently missing out just relying on Yahoo & Ninemsn.
If you do some quick searches and your web site doesn’t rank in the top 3 pages for your main keywords on Google (anything below the top 3 pages is pretty much a waste of time), then you’re leaving LOTS of traffic (and potential paying clients) on the table.
If you were to get (in particular) a first page ranking for one or more of your main keyword phrases in Google, you would be blown away with the amount of traffic and enquiries you get at your site, compared to what you currently receive.
Something else that’s important to consider when you review rankings is the amount of TEXT content on your site. The higher ranking sites almost always have lots of text content (articles, news, reviews, etc) on their site and the lower ranking ones don’t have much.
Here’s a quick experiment you can try for yourself. On Google, Yahoo & MSN, do a search for your top 1 or 2 keyword phrases, and note the sites that come out in the top 10.
Then, go to each of those 3 search engines and see how many pages of these sites are indexed, compared to yours. It’s easy to do this by just entering the following command in at each Search Engine:
site:www.domainname.com
(obviously substituting your site URL and the other top 10 site urls where appropriate)
If the number of pages in the index for your site is significantly lower than the competition, there’s one of your main reasons for a poor ranking (there are other factors, but this is an important one).
I often have prospective search engine optimisation clients give me the excuse that they are getting decent results from Yahoo & MSN, and anyway funds are tight, so they don’t want to invest in getting results in Google. You know, the old classic “Call me again in 6 - 9 months!”
However, what they don’t realise is that the additional income they would receive for a higher ranking on Google (from the ensuing customers it brought you) would not only well and truly pay for our SEO services but give them plenty of ongoing new clients, which would take care of any cashflow concerns they might have for a while to come.
Consider that many of the big companies in your market niche spend large sums of money to advertise on TV, Radio & Print to drive traffic to their web site/s & retail location/s, but a good SEO strategy will bring visitors to your site for literally cents on the dollar - a much higher ROI. According to Google’s statistics, a quality Search Engine strategy can achieve similar results but be 20 times CHEAPER than direct mail (for one example).
I guess the lesson here is not to be penny-wise and dollar-poor. Work out how many additional new paying clients you would need to get via Search Engine Optimisation results to break even with the SEO firm’s fee, and then go after the main game in town: Google.
Your return-on-investment for good Seach Engine rankings is way ahead of most any other form of advertising and marketing you can come up with, but you need to see the big picture first. Don’t wait until your competitor sees the light and takes action before you, or you’ll miss out.
Author: Eran Malloch is an Internet Marketing Consultant at WCR Internet Marketing, a specialist Australian Search Engine Marketing company. Visit our site to get a free web site analysis.
I just read this interesting article by the rather famous Mr Cutts last week and have been passing it onto my clients for future reference. Rather than lose it to the vagaries of my failing memory I have decided to add it to my blog for you to read, learn and enjoy…
August 25, 2005 @ 12:29 am
I often get asked whether I’d recommend dashes or underscores for words in urls. For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes. Why? To find out, let’s take a trip in the Google Time Machine. Set the dial for 1999, the year Matt first discovered Google. Matt was using, I dunno, maybe HotBot at that point? The curtain rises:
Matt: Hmm, this search for [FTP_BINARY] didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I got a couple scuzzy looking urls, and the other documents just have the words “FTP†and “BINARY†but the term “FTP_BINARY†doesn’t actually appear. (Note: Matt was a bit of a nerd, as you can tell.)
Some Random Person That I Don’t Remember: Have you tried Google?
Matt: What’s that?
SROTIDR: It’s a search engine written by nerds for nerds! They index numbers! Sometimes they even index punctuation, like “C++â€. Try your underscore search there.
Matt: Okay, here goes. Whoa! They actually return pages with the literal string “FTP_BINARYâ€! That’s wicked cool! (Did I mention Matt was a nerd? Big-time nerd.)
SROTIDR: Yeah. The wild thing is that they wrote a paper about how they crawl the web and rank pages.
Matt: Well, now that’s just silly. I wonder why they didn’t keep it a secret? I bet those papers will make great reading for my information retrieval class.I’ve stylized the conversation quite a bit, but I remember how impressed I was that Google indexed numbers and some punctuation (come to think of it, search engines have come a long way in five years). With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.
That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play
-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for
other reasons. 
Welcome! This blog is the musings (and occasional ramblings) of an Australian guy working in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) fields.
I’ll discuss my thoughts on these subjects, hopefully on a daily basis. Since I work as an Internet marketing consultant for WCR Internet Marketing, I get a lot of opportunities to explore and experiment on how to get successful search engine rankings on behalf of my clients, as well as set up, run and manage their Google Adwords PPC campaigns.
Drop by, or subscribe to my RSS feed, and you’ll get all the latest goss on my Net Adventures.
Eran
