My esteemed blogging colleague, Seth Godin, really missed the point in the story about the company suing Google over its disappearance from search results.
Here is Seth's entire post on the matter:
The new SEOs--lawyers
Joe points us to this article--a company is suing Google because their pagerank is too low.
Perhaps the same strategy could be used on consumers who don't want to watch your commercials...
The brevity makes me conclude that Seth didn't really read the article, Kinderstart Sues Google Over Lower Page Ranking. At best he just scanned it. The article states:
A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc., charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.
Search-result ranking does not refer to Pagerank. They are two different things. It refers to what SERP (Search Engine Results Page) your site appears on for a search on a particular term. (Yes, it's a bit confusing at first.) Let me give you a personal experience with this. I run a hobby site at www.antiventurecapital.com. For many years, if you did a search on "venture capital", it usually showed up on the second or third SERP at Google. It was always top five. Then one morning two years ago, I discovered that the site was no longer in the first five SERPS. My immediate assumption was that it had slipped a few pages downward to maybe 7th or 8th SERP. To make a long story short, the site had completely vanished as far as Google was concerned.
It was as if the site no longer existed.
About two months later it magically reappeared in Google's search results--but this time it was on a SERP in the mid-80s. I was only able to find it because of www.googlerankings.com which will scan up to the first 1000 SERPS to find your site's position in the results. No one drills down past the 5th SERP manually.
That's what this story is about. This is what happened to Kinderstart and why it is going after Google--and rightfully so.
Some SEO readers will jump to the conclusion that I was trying to game the system and that Google penalized me for it. The truth is that I wasn't. Recall that above I called my site a "hobby site". I had better things to do with my time than spend endless hours tweaking it for SEO purposes. Besides, the site was always sitting pretty somewhere in the top five SERPS.
Seth compares Kinderstarts move to suing consumers who don't want to watch your commercials. Bad analogy, Seth. A better one would be to describe it as a situation where a shop-owner goes to work one morning and discovers that his Main street store has been bulldozed, the debris removed, and a mobile taco vendor is parked in the middle of the now empty lot.
That's what it feels like for site owners when this happens.
"Google does not generally inform Web sites that they have been penalized nor does it explain in detail why the Web site was penalized," the lawsuit said.
No, it certainly doesn't. There's no recourse at all when this happens. Google is your judge, jury, and executioner.
Now you might be thinking, "So what Peter, if this does happen it's probably a rare event." Wrong. It happens a lot. Everyday Google nukes a few hundred sites in this manner without warning or explanation, according to the scuttlebut on webmaster forums. Hang out at some of the popular forums and you will see that it's true. I used to frequent Webmasterworld where tears are shed daily over these vanishings. Here's some irony. The guy running Webmasterworld was always firing off private messages to anyone who dared critiscize Google in anyway telling them that they would be banned from his site if they continued. Then one day last year, his own site was nuked by Google in the same manner--although I take it he was able to eventually have the situation rectified. How he did it, I don't know.
I wrote about my own experience last fall. Someone in the SEO field then accused me incorrectly of whining. No, when you have a site in the top five SERPs which then vanishes overnight, you have a legitimate reason to complain and even pursue legal recourse, as in the case of Kinderstart. I think I know what I'm doing since all of my other sites appear in the first two SERPS on the big three SEs. Whining is when someone complains about never being able to crack the top 100 SERPs.
That's a big difference.
So what's the lesson here?
It's simply this: don't base your online strategy on Google delivering traffic to you. Google shows itself daily to be a fickle mistress. One day she adores you and the next day it's as if you never existed.
The silver lining:
There's actually a happy ending in all of this--at least for me. Having the site vanish and my traffic decrease as dramatically as Kinderstarts' "cataclysmic 70 percent fall", forced me to find other ways of driving traffic to the site than tedious SEO techniques. Eventually these other techniques paid off and I now have have traffic that's 1.25x greater than when the site was in Google's first five SERPS. That's not bad considering it's a narrowly defined niche site aimed at startups having trouble raising venture capital or angel investor financing.
In conclusion, as I have stated here many times, having one search engine dominate the search market so heavily is bad for everyone. It's bad for online businesses which can see years of hard work aimed at building traffic evaporate overnight, and it's bad for individual searchers who are delivered increasingly lower quality results Google.
It's also time that people in the online community stopped being afraid of Google and kissing its ass. There's way too much fawning over Google on blogs. The performance of both of its key revenue drivers, Adwords and Adsense, has plummeted dramatically over the past two years. Every passing day Google looks more and more like a house of cards. (Just Google "Google click fraud" if you don't believe me.)
It's time to admit that the emperor has no clothes.
Best of luck to Kinderstart in its suit.
I don't get what is so wrong about google dominating the market for searchs?
Posted by: John Mertlesen | March 19, 2006 at 02:24 PM
The more I think about it, the more I see that this is really a brilliant tactical move on Kinderstart's part to get a million dollars worth of free publicity and traffic. Just do a www.technorati.com search to watch the kinderstart meme explode across the Internet.
Posted by: Peter | March 19, 2006 at 04:09 PM
"I don't get what is so wrong about google dominating the market for searchs?"
What is so wrong about one SE controlling 80 to 90% of your business's total traffic?
Hmmm....
Think of it this way. Suppose you lived in a country where all customer traffic to your business was controlled by the government. The government appointed Grand Commissar of Business Traffic had a list of all the customers and all the businesses in the nation, and he alone had the power to determine how many customers would be diverted to a particular business on any given day. None of the businesses truly understood how he made his decisions and all lived in fear of his wrath as somedays he would decide to completely cut off a particular business from customers.
Would a situation like this make you nervous as a business owner?
That's basically the situation we have online today with search engines. But this phase of the Net is coming to a close. Thankfully.
Posted by: Peter | March 19, 2006 at 04:57 PM
Here is what I would like to know. How were you able to regain your traffic and more after being tossed out of G's index? This same thing happened to one of my sites late last year.
Posted by: DT | March 19, 2006 at 06:30 PM
DT,
I am not going to get into specifics about my recovery strategy since every good idea on the Net has about a 6 to 12 month shelf-life. As soon as everyone starts doing it, it's dead.
But to get your creative juices flowing pretend that you have just received notice from Google informing you that your site will no longer be in its index and that it's banned from Adwords as well.
What would you do to start building up the traffic back up if you couldn't abandon the site and start over?
Posted by: Peter | March 19, 2006 at 07:09 PM
This blog provides info on how to clean up the site and request a reinclusion.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-check-your-own-site
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto
Posted by: Beef Jezos | March 19, 2006 at 07:36 PM
http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=637
We got fucked over big time.
Posted by: Peoples Cube | March 19, 2006 at 07:48 PM
Great blog.
I personally share the concerns that others have expressed about Google and its hubris. They simply don’t seem to care about the livelihood of small business owners. Google sandboxed our site, and since then I’ve had to let go of two employees and take a job myself simply because our traffic is down 90%.
I can’t wait for MSN to become a more of a player and show Google they are not the only player in town.
Stop sucking up to Google, people!
Posted by: Jeff | March 19, 2006 at 08:03 PM
In most cases, when Goog sandboxes a site, it's either the fault of a bad SEO consultant who went too far or it's some purely unintentional little thing that the webmaster did. What Google needs to do is send legit sites a 30 day warning to fix the problem instead of just dumping them without warning or recourse. Then it would have far fewer people angry at itself.
Posted by: Lane Harris | March 20, 2006 at 12:16 AM
Kinderstart.com went "supplemental". Googleguy said he had a theory about this on 03/04. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33351-16-10.htm
It's suspected to be a flaw in the Google changes that are dubbed "Big Daddy" http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/ beginning of January.
Some SEO Firms advice to hold still a bit longer because if it's a bug, then it should be fixed by the end of the month.
However, the same effect can be the case if Google penalizes your site because of SEO practices that violate their Webmaster Guidelines http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. Google is clear about it, if you violate it, you risk a ban, without prior notice.
A Ban (or better "penalty") is a manual process done by a human who reviews the site in question first, to check if the violation happened unintentionally or on purpose. Only if the ladder is the case a Site is penalized (like the corporate site of BMW Germany).
If you are drunk in public and a cop sees you; you might end up the night in jail. When you wake up sober the next morning and are mad at the cop's, be mad at yourself and don't start a lawsuit, because you are not going to win. Same thing here, with Google, actually not, because you were sober before you did it and knew it's wrong and the consequences, sober when you did it and sober afterwards.
Anyway, I don't know how you want to sue somebody who provides a free service you can use at your own risk and based on the rules Google set itself (I believe there is a disclaimer/terms of use somewhere). If you don't like it, don't use it.
For Webmasters does not exist any inclusion guarantee, none about being added to the index at all and also none that guaranties that you stay in it. Google is not providing a paid inclusion service that makes such promises. What is the basis for the lawsuit? I would like to know the arguments this suit is based on.
I also don't like the dominance Google has right now. Too much power in one hand is never good, it does not matter who the power holds, a Saint or a Sinner, but market dominance is clearly no argument for a lawsuit. I am not aware of any law like that, with exception of the Anti-Thrust laws, but then would it be the US government and not a small company from Newark that is suing.
I believe that this suit was started to get the publicity. I haven't seen any official document or statement from neither KinderStart nor Google. If there is a secret suit and the whole thing is not just a rumor (April, 1st is still a few more days to go), I believe it will be dropped quickly by KinderStart, because they got what they wanted and I bet it was cheap too.
Posted by: Roy[SAC] | March 20, 2006 at 03:24 AM
Remember that google newer actually think, it's not like someone at google decided to nuke an site, no it's done by aoutomation by and wery complex system, that probably is pretty damn full of bugs.
Phaps an simple network error or an hardware failure in one of google's boxes is all it takes for at site to vanish completely from google's memmory.
Remember what google is trying to do is not to evaluate an site for relevance, or anything like that but to build an 100% automated popularity index of the web and, that index is under constant pressure from spammers, and the actual algoritms are secret and probably under constant development.
Posted by: Daniel Udsen | March 20, 2006 at 05:46 AM
Nice column... I personally think this is a brilliant PR move on the part of Kinderstart. Just wish I'd thought of it first! ;-)
I also think you hit the nail on the head with your advice to not rely on Google for your traffic. My site is Alex’s Coupons ( http://www.alexscoupons.com ) and we've been riding the Google Rollercoaster for the last year or two. I run a completely clean site and don't use any blackhat SEO techniques, yet we've still been screwed by Google on three separate occasions. Here’s a short history:
Pre-November 2004: Solid rankings for our site, nothing spectacular, but we ranked high for a few key terms.
November 2004: Drop almost completely out of the rankings.
February 2005: Rankings back to Pre-November 2004 levels + a little bit of boost.
May 2005: Rankings go through the roof. Ranked high for dozens of key terms. Life is good.
September 22, 2005: Drop almost completely out of the rankings.
October 15, 2005: Rankings go through the roof again. In fact the best ever.
December 27, 2005: Drop almost completely out of the rankings for the third time. Pages are still in the index, but very few are ranking high for key terms.
The good thing is that these drops force me to work harder on alternate ways of promoting our site including newspapers (e.g. Hot Site of the Day in USA Today & dozens of Gannet Newspapers), TV (e.g. upcoming Feature Story on Evening Magazine Seattle, Site of the Day on Boston, St. Louis and Jacksonville newscasts), Magazines (upcoming article in June issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance), social bookmarking (e.g. Stumbleupon, Furl, del.icio.us), viral networking (e.g. Digg, word of mouth, tell a friend), podcasts (e.g. Mommycast, Geekcast) and blogs.
For me Google is becoming less and less relevant every day. Partly because of our other promotional efforts, but also because my Yahoo referral traffic has quintupled in the past few months, even though my rankings at Yahoo have remained stable. That tells me that at least some people have gotten so fed up with Google that they're switching to Yahoo. I know that I have!
Keep up the good work...
– Todd Martini
Posted by: Todd Martini | March 20, 2006 at 01:50 PM
Todd,
Thanks. Very inspirational post. I just launched a new company. This time around I am not spending any time worrying about Google. The webpages are optimized for SEs and that's about it. I'm not spending a penny on Adwords yet although that may change in the future. So far traffic is good.
Posted by: Peter | March 20, 2006 at 09:52 PM
Todd, Are you reading my diary? Looks like it, because what happened to your site happened to ours, exactly at the same time.
I know that Google does not like Affiliate Sites (in their organic Index) very much, but I think this is not the case here. Jagger and Jagger II (Big Daddy) and their "experimentation" with the algo's must be the cause of all this.
What p**sed me off was the fact that Google Traffic almost vanished completely right during the holidays. I had to work my a** off to compensate, quickly with pretty good success. Yahoo likes our site more now. Ask.com ignores us more or less after eating tons of our server resources last summer. MSN does not know what to do with us I think, it's like with the tides. High, low, high, low ....
Connie Berg (Flamingo World) was way ahead of us a few years back when it came to efforts to not rely on search engines. I remember the whining in 2003 after Google's Florida update that but a lot of Datafeed/Webmerge affiliate sites out of business, she had no problem at all.
Also posting the Affiliate Site URL was no problem for her, because copycats were not feared by her. Copy the site, "sure go ahead, send me the link that I can see how my site looked in the past, just like archive.org".
We learned our lessons. That's why didn't put us Google's f**k ups during the last 15 months out of business, but it did hurt nevertheless.They better get their act straight soon or Google will have an Index full of pages that b*tch and yell about Google.
Posted by: Roy[SAC] | March 20, 2006 at 09:53 PM
Hey Peter,
Thanks for the nice comments. I hope your startup is continuing to do well. We're still struggling in the Google rankings, but over the next 6 weeks we should be getting a lot of media exposure. At some point I'm hopeful people will realize that Google really is broken, but I'm not holding my breath! ;-)
Here's an example of just how screwed up Google is right now. Currently in the index you can find 12,300 pages of my site by an IP address (69.20.29.210) that was deactivated three months ago when I had to change servers due to the fact that we were hacked. For the actual site (www.alexscoupons.com) you can only find 801 pages in the index.
Oh well I'll just keep plugging away. Hope everything is going great. Take care.
-- Todd
Posted by: Todd Martini | April 22, 2006 at 10:58 PM
Todd, read my lastest on marketing without Google.
Posted by: Peter | April 25, 2006 at 12:25 PM
Nice read, more info to add to my useless knowledge of search engine ranking lol
Posted by: bob smith | April 16, 2008 at 04:50 PM
S.E.O is a blackart sometimes and because on SERP's changes things can not always goto plan, especially with the semantic searches and WEB 2.0 networks that can alter things on a daily timescale as opposed to years ago when things were far slower.
Posted by: site seo | June 23, 2008 at 04:10 PM
I think that results on www.clusty.com it is better than on other web search engines. And what you think of it?
Posted by: Reak Reervegal | December 17, 2008 at 07:02 AM