61 replies to this topic

[MaryKrysia]

Business isn't about compassion.

After working for over 3 decades for small, medium and large businesses, I can only completely agree with this statement. Although have I met compassionate people in the business world, the business world iself has never been about compassion. Business is very competitive. It's about striving and winning, or at the very least, simply striving.

There are places you can find compassion, but business is not one of those places. Consider a friend, a church or synagogue, a support group, even a pet . . . any or all of these are capable of providing emotional support. And when you are ready to compete again, get back into the "game" and try again and do it even better the next time.

[ewc21]

People often associate site performance with their love-hate relationship with search engines. When businesses boom online, they rave about search engines and when businesses fail, they easily whack search engines as if SEs owe them anything or pay them royalties when SERPs show their sites at page one, or outright number one.

The lack of accountability on unstable search result trends have only made search engines appear as the only responsible entity.

[oneofthe3lions]

I wasn't aware bleeding heart liberalism entered the internet business arena now

Something that they definately 'could' use in dearl MN huh?

[MaryKrysia]

wasn't aware bleeding heart liberalism entered the internet business arena now

Law of the Fist?

I agree they could use a little heart in MN.

[Cameron Olthuis]

I'm not sure if anyone has said this or not because I just skimmed this thread.

IMO - I think it's wrong for someone to depend on Google for their livelihood.

[Jill]

I'm not sure if anyone has said this or not because I just skimmed this thread.

Only like about 20 times...

[noel_x99]

mcanerin - great analogies.

People often associate site performance with their love-hate relationship with search engines. When businesses boom online, they rave about search engines and when businesses fail, they easily whack search engines as if SEs owe them anything or pay them royalties when SERPs show their sites at page one, or outright number one.

I am constantly and consistently amzaed by this attitude. When Google is doing a "terrible job" that can generally be translated as "my page is not in the top 10". I love Google means "my page is in the top 10."

I see it all the time in many forums: Where do people get the idea that any search engine owes them anything?

[Alan Perkins]

I'm with the other mods and admins on this.

However, I would add that Google (and other SEs) do have some duty of care towards webmasters whose sites Google depends upon to provide relevant search results. That duty does not extend to guaranteeing a free ride for life, but it does extend as far, IMO, as:

• respecting robots.txt and other robot standards
• respecting copyright and fair use doctrines
• not hammering a site so hard that it falls over or provides a significantly degraded service to its other visitors
• providing a fair, accurate description of a site or page from that site in their search results

[meta]

pemburung,

Google does provide information to all those webmasters, that's the purpose of the webmaster guidelines. They don't necessarily know which of their rankings is making a profit for webmasters, though. That would require that they have information about what goes on once the visitor clicks away from Google and looks at another site. So despite their power to drive traffic to a site, they are in a weak position to identify specific sites that would suffer from changes. It's true that they'd like to have all that information, that's where they are going with stats. But even if they had the information, how would they notify webmasters other than through the guidelines? By law, they can only send e-mail if there is a business relationship meeting specific guidelines, such as an opt-in by the recipient.

Meta

[Alan Perkins]

One thing I would say about Webmaster guidelines.

They are not there because search engines want to tell you what to do. They are there

1. because Webmasters want to know what to do
2. because search engines want to tell you what not to do

Search engines would work perfectly well if Webmasters just ignored them and created the best site they possibly could for their visitors, and engaged in other marketing activities for that site in order to obtain inbound links. That would be a perfect world for search engines. The guidelines are a sign that their world is not perfect.

[mcanerin]

Not to mention the fact that it's not possible to target "small businesses", only "websites that look like a small business might have made them".

And I'd LOVE to see Google make the argument that, mutatus mutandi, they felt it was OK to protect some business owners, but not others, and that they had decided that the ones they should not care about are the ones (big business) that generally have the most popular sites and also happen to have the most resources and inclination towards lawsuits...

Also, as long as spammers are also small businesses (and they usually are), it's an impractical suggestion, from an anti-spam approach.

The real issue here isn't the search engines, it's the spammers.
Ian

[Alan Perkins]

The real issue here isn't the search engines, it's the spammers.

That's certainly one of the issues ... that search engine algorithms have to cope with attempts to deceive them, and sometimes coping with those attempts means that sites that warrant good placement get lesser placement.

Another issue, though, is that search engine algorithms are by no means perfect and, even if spammers did not exist, algorithms would be changed over time in order to provide better and better search results to searchers. With any algo change there has to be winners and losers - i.e. some sites receive more traffic as a result, other sites receive less.

Whether the winners and losers are "big business" or "small business" is moot to the search engine - it just wants to deliver more relevant results to its searchers, or they'll leave and find another search engine that can.

[meta]

The guidelines are a sign that their world is not perfect.

Golly. Who would think otherwise?

[John Terzakis]

Non-sense is right. Over 1 million results of nothing on Google for a keyword that has been setup on Yahoo! for great results.
Silly Google-Bot.

[Jill]

Thanks for digging up this 2005 thread for that comment, John.