That is precisely why Google is over. Here is the evidence:
Being the largest game in town, black hats need only focus on on guy to game and that’s Google. And Google is losing the arms race, it is the Elephant killed by a billion ants! The increasingly poor results served up on Search Engine Results Pages is proof. Every search delivers large spammy selections from content farms: broad shallow sites filled with vapid information. About.com is the most legit among the villains! (Shame on you NY Times Corporation!) But thousands of others are even more guilty: black hats hiring low wage/slave wage cut and paste workers copy information onto millions of pages so the site owners can sell Google Ads. (A shout out to a crowd of bloggers who since Jan 1 have been rapidly building momentum on this topic: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail, On the increasing uselessness of Google, Trouble in the House of Google
If you deliver spammy results you train your visitors to seek answers elsewhere. And as I predicted years ago, vertical search engines and upstarts are gaining ground. Bing delivers beautifully. Blekko delivers better. Wikki answers the homework questions. And when shopping, hell, just start at Amazon or Ebay and move on from there. Vertical social media and tightly focused message boards still deliver some of the best answers to questions asked and answered by passionate individuals. Need a special undershirt that won’t chafe for a child wearing a scoliosis brace? The answer can be found on a message board – because the brace company that sells it has been crowded out of the Google SERP by other inane sites all served up by our infamous friend GoogleBot who simply CANNOT differentiate between quality information and web trash.
Google stopped innovating long ago. We empowered Google by going to it and clicking on its ads. After their initial eureka moment, they bought all other innovations by acquiring companies. Their SaaS offerings of little spreadsheet ditties and social marketing confections are so disjointed and insecure they could pass as Open Source! My question is how can a company so big lack so much vision? Google is clearly distressed about this, note the latest change in leadership at the top. But going back to the founders is a mistake. Steve Jobs may have had the hutzpah to pull a Phoenix with Apple – but in my view that is a rarity!
What does this mean for businesses trying to be found? 1. SEO within reason, that means follow Google Web Master Guidelines, but don’t obsess. 2. NEVER, ever undertake an SEO effort beyond Google Web Master Guidelines unless it has an additional benefit such as lead generation, sales or enhancement of your web site experience. That way if your effort may give you a temporal SEO bump but it will also deliver a lasting marketing lift. 3. Create really useful content for humans. Understand WHEN they need your product and look for blogs and other platforms whose content is associated with that moment of need. 4. Solve problems where your clients look for solutions: message boards, blogs, user groups, associations etc. 5. When considering SEO do not ignore Bing or Blekko and others. 6. Beware of the Social Media sink hole! Where do your customers congregate? Go there. Just because “everyone is on Facebook” doesn’t mean your customers are there, or care to hear about you there. TAKE NOTE: If Google was over in my mind five years ago, Facebook was over two years ago! Vertical social media is here. But that is a topic for another day!
Happy Hunting!
Print publications had this problem in the early days and so the BPA provided circulation audits. Yes media kits still whipped up the marketing spin, but as a planner you could lay those green sheets and yellow sheets side by side and make some objective baseline judgements.
This is not too much to ask from media companies today.
After BPA came broadcast and Nielson, boxes on sets reported back to the home office. Beyond that Nielson ratings were a bit shaky but overall, they provided a level playing field.
With perhaps the exception of Life Magazine, (and that is a stretch) no print publication ever came close to the monopolistic power of Google and now Facebook. Even Hearst, with all his power was puny by today’s standards.
And Broadcast bloomed and diluted into 200 channels in three short decades. But that was after the FCC came in and regulated local markets carefully limiting cross media ownership of local licenses.
Monopolies are bad for business.
Today we have ventured into far more dangerous waters. Marketers have become cheerleaders for the media monopolies that are frankly, stealing money from our clients — and frankly from all of us too.
Marketers have always tended to self-delusion and selling self delusion to clients. Those of us truth tellers in this business are truly misfits. But when you work with a mid-sized B-to-B operation. When you are sitting across the table from the guy who is pulling those dollars out of his own wallet, if you want to earn his trust you’d better speak the truth. You and your client are on the frontlines. If you and your clients play in this very large slice of the market, you’ve taken your knocks. You can smell BS from 20 paces.
And here is what we smell:
Social Media is NOT effective in many cases, Facebook has not provided any answers on true activity. Who will benefit? Why we should buy? They have provided so many reasons NOT to trust them, their “auction” pricing is the least of it!
Search is no longer right for many companies — increasing cost is a huge factor. Google could help by making its auction far more transparent. When you buy shares on the NYSE you know the volume, the last tick — that’s the least Google could do. Who is bidding, how much and when? Why should I trust Google?
SEO has always been smoke and mirrors populated by hyperventilating “experts” who jump tag any twitch of the needle as a Google conspiracy. And yet, marketers are fixated by it! I was at a pre-Bing meeting at Microsoft. The guys there were promising a different sort of search engine, far more open. I said, “Really? How long will that really last?” Not long. It ended when we left the room.
When media companies are making what Google, Facebook et al. are they will never succumb to a tepid third-party audit scheme. Say what you want about Hitwise and Alexa they are not delivering what only the horse’s mouth can.
The only way to get what we need is with swift and sharp government regulation — don’t hold your breadth.
In the meantime what do the truth tellers do? They find their client’s True North. Judiciously, with care, testing, analyzing, tweaking programs and never, ever, following the marketing lemmings.
What’s the killer data in this chart? Social Media is a total time sink. Lots of effort, little return. It is no surprise that it disappeared from the EXCERPT, because it is pretty incendiary to all those Social Media proponents out there.
Thank you Marketing Sherpa for confirming what I have been saying for months on end — and teaching at Zebworks.com! Thank you! And here is the kicker, blogging — that old fashioned practice takes lots of energy BUT delivers much better return. This re-affirms the advice we have been giving clients for years. Center your social media program around blogging. Yes! Booyah! Bravo Sherpa! I hope the rest of the report is as compelling!
The result, as we all experience every day, is truly lousy software. Would you buy a car that crashed every time it hit a pebble? Why do we continue to buy Microsoft products? Why do we continue to run like star struck lemmings to Apple? Why do we continue to query Google when it can’t give us the answer to our query? Why do we share our lives on Facebook when they relentlessly leverage our dignity for their gain?
Why is it OK for companies to give us somewhat functional products that deliver a modicum of efficiency? Why do we give them a pass? Our monopoly laws only bruise these behemoths, none truly stop them in their path.
In the meantime, we all lose and we lose big. Competition is stifled so we pay too much for too little. Innovation is snuffed out and great new ideas never see the light of day.
I am really disgusted with Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft – but that does not compare to my disgust with our hapless, toothless government. All talk, no action while the marketplace delivers garbage and our lives, community and the world are gutted.
It is time to chose and to chose critically. Ask yourself: do I really need this software? Is free really free? What is Facebook really good for? Should I really be paying to advertise here? Will I really get the results I need for my business? Is what I am doing, right now, for me, my company, my community, honorable?
Question. Question to discover what will make our world truly more productive.
Says Ngyen: “I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but the best way to get things implemented within a large company is through education. Things get done faster when everyone is on board. So that requires constant educating and training. The more people that understand SEO the better. You want advocates for SEO in every area of the business – from engineering to upper management.” See the Team Preparation Process Zebworks Master Class for how to accomplish this in your company.
Says Ngyen: “With a business like Shopzilla, I’m always challenged with the sheer size of our sites. We have millions of products and various different business lines. So keeping everything indexed and ranking is a constant battle. I spend a lot of time thinking about optimal site architecture and site performance. For large sites, even small changes in indexing can equate to significant revenue shifts.” If you’re small you need to do this too, and we’ve covered it in the Site Architecture Best Practices Zebworks Master Class.
Big company mojo can be yours – make that must be yours if you are to succeed on the Internet, because it’s not getting any easier and only the savvy will succeed!
I was speaking to a family member. A savvy young woman in her early 40s who I would call an average computer user. Her work does not keep her at her screen 10 hours a day, in fact she uses her computer to augment her work and to support her personal needs (kids’ homework, occasional shopping, email etc). The rest of the time she works face-to-face with retail customers. Here is what she said, “I hate Google, because when I go there to help my kids on their homework I just get shopping information. I don’t want to buy, I want to know. I use Wikkipedia.”
And there you have it. A regular Joe/Josephine who has discovered that there are other more effective places to get answers than Google. Google will go the way of the IBM. Too big, too cumbersome, too out of touch. Too worried about being gamed on a meta scale to deliver anything relevant on the user scale.
Enter Bing. A compelling hybrid. Ironically this Microsoft product learned a lesson from Apple: Beautiful to look at, solving a chosen group of user needs. It is clear that the folks at Bing asked themselves: what do users use search engines for most? The answer: Entertainment, News, Travel and Shopping. “Let’s place ourselves there in a most aesthetically pleasing and robust manner.” Bing will become the go-to consumer search site. But don’t go there to research your term paper, or to conduct any other type of muscular search. It just won’t return good information. And the truth is, neither does Google. It is only slightly better than Bing in that department. Doing robust deep research still involves endlessly long search phrases and serious poking around over an extended period of time.
We are actively engaged in researching new technologies here at Camarès and we are finding that it can take weeks and hundreds of searches on Google alone – never mind Wikkipedia, YouTube and other engines. Invariably we find our answers nested deep in blogs that are linked to each other and NOT as a direct result of a Google or Bing search. Our Josephine described the essence of the problem: “Half the time I don’t know the right question to ask.” Well the truth is she does know the right question and so do we at Camarès, it is the engines themselves that are not indexing information in a way that humans actually search for it. I call this the Nuance Gap. Humans are nuanced, search engines are not. And it is the one place that Google has consistently failed the user since day one.
Until Google bridges this gap (and my bet it will never, ever be able to do this) it will die a slow twisting death, nibbled away by more compelling vertical competitors. Right now it is skating on its huge cash reserves and the fact that companies are willing to auction up the price of keywords beyond anything that is affordable. It is also skating on all the other Joes & Josephines who have not yet changed their behavior, but will over time. Traffic will diminish – in fact it already is. Right now, Google may simply be calling it “market saturation” but if it were doing its job right, it would have out Binged, Bing a long time ago.
This romance surround is created by implementing the highest production values. Great imagery, with great lighting, superb sound and simply fabulous, to die for models. When done right, even an Imac is a super model. Images spill across pages of glossy luxe magazines too fabulous to touch, evoking wordless emotion. So it is no wonder that so many businesses hold up luxury goods as aspirational branding examples.
But the Internet has put a “spanner in the works” for luxury brands. The high production values they demand – rich media, flash and just plain sexy sites that are, really really cool but unusable – present a dilemma for those who aspire to higher production values: they are tough for search engine bots to crawl and tougher still for humans to shop.
Frankly, search engine indexing, is less important for a luxury brand, it is already well established. So luxury brands have the luxury of not really needing search. In actuality what they do require is a deftly produced social marketing program that propels their brand forward. Most businesses whose brands are less well known require both indexing and social media.
This presents a tension: how do you remain indexable while also presenting a rich experience? Sites must be developed with both needs front and center. And the best approach is often a hybrid. Enough rich media for sex appeal, just enough well-tagged text and regular updates to increase your importance to bots. And here is where many non-luxury sites fall short. It is entirely possible to have rich media with great production values without spending a fortune. Its all in the planning and the choice of talent.
For non-luxury brands, social media must be produced to be repurposed across many vibrant platforms where brand influencers come to connect and play, it must engage, it must be relevant and it must be frequent. It must also be authentic. Here is where many smaller businesses can win big. Nothing beats the authentic voice of ownership, even if it is a bit packaged and polished by an agency, it still rings true.
As for shoppabillity, many luxury brands simply ignore any rational web conventions. I suppose they build in their exclusive attitude by being impossible to navigate. Businesses ought not to use them as aspirational shopping examples. However, they should build the most streamlined, elegant shopping cart possible, minimizing clicks and clutter, getting people to the submit button swiftly – now that’s luxury!
What’s better than being a luxury brand? Looking luxury but being elegantly facile to buy from.
The New York Times reported on its front page this morning that Walmart and Amazon is in an all out price war. Target is joining in too as retailers fight not to cede market share with others. This is old news! If you think this is not affecting you small online business, it is. Online marketers have been in a discounting double death grip since the recession began. Aggressively bidding higher on search engines to gain, keep and hold market share close.
There is only one solution: Change the game by manufacturing something unique and desirable, preferably niche market oriented.
The quick fix of broadening product categories to increase average sales value is a non-starter – it simply places you smack dab in the same situation again with larger competitors.
And, this solution as any major business solution demands investment and time, read: risk taking. But it must be done because 1% margins are not sustainable. Even by the big boys.
Now I know I promised Denise here at Camarès that I’d be less snarky and more up beat on my blog, but this is GOOOOOOGLE after all! Here’s Matt Cutts’ most recent post and my response in blue.
“Back in August we mentioned a developer preview of Caffeine, which is new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure. The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that a small percentage of Google’s users will benefit from the technology behind Caffeine in their regular searches.” says Cutts.
A SMALL PERCENTAGE?!?!?! Given the number of “users” that would be everyone who wants to be indexed, that small percentage is a HUGE number. AND oh by the way, we were seeing indications that Caffiene (or its little brother) was already in use in September. SO consider Caffeine launched. (If you read further in his post, not even Cutts can assure us definitively that SEOs are being paranoid about this. So consider it so.)
“I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.” blythely babbles Cutts.
Oh I feel so reassured…I feel…I feel…positively Pretty…”See that pretty bot in the server there!” “What server, where?”
You know, its not the “researchers” who will feel the changes its the publishers, retailers and bloggers who depend on Google for being found. They are the ones who have followed Google Web Master tools to the letter, not participated in black hat SEO BS and really done the right thing all along. Glaringly missing from all of this are facts, dates, times, parameters…stuff us Web Masters, developers and marketers can rely on. “I don’t expect” is not a fact!
