Google forces us to lay off 2 employees

Well the "squeeze the little guy" thing has some political overtones. My advice to anyone in business, especially this business... Never put your eggs in one basket.

I remember when I first went looking for a loan to expand my business and purchase a data center, the first thing the bank asked me was:

"does any one client of yours account for more than 1/3 of your business?"

Answering yes to that question got me turned down for a loan. Of course I did get to sit in the sweet at the Bradly Center, drink free beer, and watch the Bucks.

So just ask yourself one question. Does any one client and or "income" source you have account for more than 1/3 of your business? If it does, then you better diversify pretty quick.

More often than not, little guys "squeeze" themselves. Move on.

 

OK thats a fair point to make, however it is difficult (at best) to avoid having google as the mainstay of your SE traffic. I think, telling people to avoid having google being more than 1/3 of your sites/companies web traffic is a little too much. It's not something that can be avoided.

 

Yeah sure. Just as soon as you explain how other companies have anything to do with Google giving search preferences to sites with adsense ads.

Or you could just admit that you have no proof and your whole argument is a load of BS.

 

are you really, truly this Naive to think that google follows that "do no evil" crap and is an upstanding member of the global community only there to serve you?

really, are you?

 

I really truly believe that Google is not about to destroy the advertising network that accounts for 85+% of their income just to make a few extra bucks from a fly by night spammy website.

By the way I'm still waiting for your damning evidence that I'm somehow wrong.

 

Really? How so? I see more traffic to KingBloom from Yahoo, than I ever see from Google... I see more to my Hosting Company website from Yahoo, than I ever see from Google...

I will agree it can be difficult to maintain such a balance, but when you see 1/3 or more of your business relying on one factor/customer/client/revenue source, it is either time to try to correct that, or get out of the business. You lose that, and you are out of business anyway.

Sometimes I really wonder what people did for a living before Google...

 

"what Google giveth .....Google taketh away"

"Building any business that relies on free search engine traffic is at best akin to playing russian roulette with a loaded 9mm glock.

 

While there are many other good ways to gain traffic, there's no reason to avoid getting as much traffic as you can from Google. You just have to keep more cash on hand to cover your costs in case something happens. Someone already pointed this out earlier in the thread. No matter where you get your traffic from having the money to cover yourself for at least 3 months is always a good idea. If your traffic all comes from one risky source then you should increase your buffer to 6 months. You never know when disaster can strike, but if have enough savings you can just ride it out. This is common for any business that does seasonal work.

 

A " few extra bucks"? I'm guessing, if this is infact the case, it would be more along the lines of potentially 1/4 of their income.

And as I said, I will go out of my way to give you what you seek once you give me what I seek... showing me an industry leader that doesnt partake in such activities. After all, I did ask first.

 

Your request was off topic and was only meant to dodge the issue. Whether or not industry leaders engage in underhanded tactics is matter of perception. Which only suggests that you have no proof since you're trying so hard to move the subject away from Google.

A quarter of their income? I'd ask for proof of that too, but I already know you pulled that figure out of your ass.

 

No, my request was on topic to prove a point... if that point evades you, well.. not sure what I can do to relegate you into logical thinking processes..

the figure is a "guess":

100 go to google.com and do a search
10% click on sponsored ads
60% click on the first 2 links they see
25% click on, lets call them "suspect" listings
5% other clicks (page 2, 3 etc) or leaving google.

Sounds reasonable to me.

 

You talk of logical thinking and yet all your arguments are based on guesswork and fuzzy math. That may work in a philosophy debate, but the real world requires facts and solid numbers. Perhaps you should study the information in this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method.

 

perhaps you should learn what fuzzy math and fuzzy logic means first:
mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/62896.html

 

I used it in a vernacular definition.

I hope you realize that the more you dodge the issue the more you prove my point that your outlandish claims of Google giving search preferences to adsense sites is a load of crap.

 

OK, lets clear this up son:

1) I didn't say that they ARE doing this, simply that the potential is there for abuse.

2) I AM saying that the system is abused and pondered if perhaps Google somehow allows for this to happen knowingly in a "for profit" mindset.
2a) and if so, if it is illegal.

Now that we've backed up, please show me WHERE in this thinking you are confused.

 

There's always a potential for abuse, but in this case there's no benefit to Google. Sure they could make money by directing traffic to adsense farms, but that traffic won't convert well for the users of adwords. Those users will then pull out of adwords and spend their advertising money elsewhere. Bored surfers are not the best customers for most businesses.

A scheme like that does not help Google in the long run. It chases away advertisers and makes their search engine results less relevant. I highly doubt that Google would purposely destroy their entire business model for a short term increase in their profit margin. Especially when Google has multiple competitors who would love to take their place as the top search engine.

 

Well I disagree that there is no benefit to google.

1) would be difficult to prove at best
2) profits to be made are in the billions or more depending on how long they can hide it
3) traffic would convert (at least partly) for adwords members because that initially, is what the "searcher" is looking for in the first place. The bored surfer would only apply to people looking for phrases like "motorcycle forums" or something, correct?

I dont see it chasing away advertisers in the near or short term (save for those businesses that have already either smelled a scam as evidenced by the class action lawsuits for click fraud)

I think a good excercise though would be to see a comparative list is results for high paying Key words from all the SE's (well, lets say top 4 or 5 SE's anyway) and compairing them. Baseline could be say:

1) top 2 pages of results (or top 20 results all told)
2) ignoring the URL but manually checking the linked too pages
3) finding which of those results in the top 20 have adsense on them
3a)figuring in that what could be construed as an adsense site (e.g.; A site primarily focused to earn adsense revenue and not meet the surfers needs.)

 

If that were true placing adsense all over your site woud be the number one SEO strategy. Go ahead and try that out without any other form of optimization and see what happens.

 

again, you're misreading. Adsense itself doesn't provide a webmaster with top results listings. But I'm going to bet that google knows what SEO is and perhaps understands that SEO'd pages/sites will more than likely have Adsense on them, with nothing more than "just enough" information to lure a surfer to that page in hope they click an adsense ad.

So in other words, and for clarity.. google isnt basing its top results in various keywords on "if they have an adsense ad", but more so based on the type of SEO (or perhaps amount of it or maybe even certain charactoristics) that has been done... something recognized in the algorythem.

again, it's theory, but a doable theory.. and since algorythems are propriatary, who would know?

 

Sites with good SEO get listed high in Google. Everyone on this forum knows that. Google even gives out basic SEO advice on their site. I don't see anything devious about it. Yeah some people play the system and then Google respondes by changing something about the system which is why the original poster's site lost its rank in Google. Then all the blackhats change their tactics to keep pace with Google.