It has been a very challenging year for web marketers, and as a result we are now finding it very hard to find anything positive to say about Google and its latest shenanigans! (Please note that from hereon I will be referring to the all powerful search engine as Gobble, so as not to give it any more additional web mentions, which will only contribute to its world dominance). Of course, we know that in the past Gobble has tried its best to stop black hat techniques such as keyword stuffing, invisible text and doorway pages to name a few – and rightly so! That’s what we admired Gobble for. None of these shameful tactics add any value at all to the user experience. Who wants to visit a website that has been set up solely for the purpose of cramming in keywords and links resulting in poor content that makes no sense at all to the visitor. However, following a succession of algorithm updates released this year such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird (don’t you just love the way they use cute, furry animals as their means of attack), we have found that even websites, which do contain relevant and quality content are being hit, and that SEO experts and business owners alike, which have been doing everything they can to satisfy Gobble’s demands are still being quite harshly penalised.
The biggest threat has been from Gobble’s new campaign against inbound links. For years, Gobble has been spouting on about increasing your website’s authority by getting as many other sites to link to you as possible, as long as they are quality sites with relevant content, rather than just adding your site link to a ton of link farms – fair enough. They also introduced Gobble Page Rank, which actually judged the quality of websites based on the number of inbound links it had. Now, Gobble has decided that not only are inbound links no longer a big factor in positioning your website, and their Gobble Page Rank is now all but obsolete, but having a few links that they don’t consider to be the best quality or relevance can be so damning that it can potentially make a small or medium business that relies on web trade go bust over night! Also, have they even considered that a disgruntled ex-employee or customer, or even a competitor could potentially go around creating bad links to your website without you even being aware of it. A little bit harsh don’t you think Gobble?
The next question we should ask is why would Gobble want to do this? Why penalise the poor small business owner that has spent hundreds of unpaid hours in creating a great website with amazing content that their customers love so much they can back again and again? Surely that’s the whole aim of a quality website. Within the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) industry there are whispers that their paid advertising platform, Gobble Adwords, is the key to answering that question. We already know that Gobble puts preference to companies that are already paying for clicks with a Gobble Adwords campaign, so how can it squeeze even more money from businesses who have been enjoying a solid page one organic position over the past few years and therefore haven’t needed to pay for advertising? You guessed it. Give them no option but to pay too by making them do a Houdini from the organic listings.
So what can we learn from all this? Let’s just say that building and maintaining a good position in Gobble’s search engine will always be a constant battle. The more they try and make SEO as an industry redundant, the more we will fight back. If online marketing didn’t exist then how could any company make themselves be found among the billions of other competitor websites out there. It used to be possible for small business to compete with killer brands with a good online strategy, although it appears that Gobble is trying to take us back to the old TV advertising days, where those with the deepest pockets wins.
