How Google Profits from Irrelevance
I just read The Register’s interesting article today “Full-up Google choking on web spam?”
The article cites estimates that “robot-generated spam consists of anywhere between one-fifth and one-third of the Google index” and indicates that Google is “engaged in an arms race with search engine optimizers.” But I wonder, is this web spam actually bad for Google? And are Google (and Yahoo! for that matter) really out to get the SEO industry (like posts here and here indicate)? Do they really want to destroy SEO as a whole or even the worst kinds of SEO like web spam?
Maybe not. Google may take some action here and there, but I believe that they actually like a little mud in the main organic results for commercial terms. Why? Because less than stellar organic results (from practices like web spam) mean higher CTR’s on their paid links and more juice for their quarterly earnings.
The simple fact is that Google and Yahoo! want their paid links to be more relevant than their organic results on searches of a commercial nature. Saying Google/Yahoo wants to get rid of SEO is kind of like saying the National Hockey League wants to abolish fighting. They may say this publicly, but the right mix of fighting fills the seats and gets more people tuning in (e.g., makes more $). There is a saturation point where fighting detracts from the game, but the NHL has engineered their rules, fines, suspensions, etc. to create an optimal level of fighting.
Isn’t the same thing going on in the SERP’s? Doesn’t Google/Yahoo like these to be slightly irrelevant and haven’t they engineered a system that makes this so? The Register article today posted a really interesting comment from a webmaster regarding Google’s manipulation of its index: “At this rate, in a year the SERPS will be nothing but Amazon affiliates, Ebay auctions, and Wiki clones. Those sites don’t seem to be affected one bit by the supplemental hell, 301’s, and now deindexing.”
It would be over the top to say Google wants its organic results to be completely irrelevant (like the comment above suggests) and they certainly have every incentive to be fantastically relevant for non-commercial search terms (which they are). But a little irrelevance is good for paid links and paid links is how Google makes money.
SEO isn’t the bad guy here. They are simply playing in a system set up to create mud. Consider also how Google displays SEO optimized pages. A recent search on “printer cartridges” brought up these two paid links first, with a cleanly optimized title and marketing message:
The same search brought up the following two organic listings first:
Why do these organic links have such a muddy message? Because this is the way Google has engineered the system. Webmasters have to manipulate their sites in this manner to get listed. Which set of links would you rather click on? Which one makes Google money?At the end of the day, I come back to the following inherent problem: For commercial terms, Google and Yahoo! have a huge incentive to make their main search results less relevant than their paid search listings. Because the system rewards them for paid links, users have to put up with some mud in their main results. Shouldn’t we just accept that SERP’s on commercial terms will be a bit muddy because most if not all of the organic results are gamed? Is Google Base going to change this? Or maybe there is a better way.
May 5th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
When I think about how google was a few years ago, I just feel like throwing up now when I look at their search interface.. Bah, A company has to earn some income if they want to stay alive.. we can’t do much about that unfortunately. Google is still the #1 search engine for me anyway..
Kiltak
[Geeks Are Sexy] Tech. News
May 7th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Dunno… i think you are just implying on that you can’t read, and simply klick @ the first link you see. READ brother READ… google still rocks imho
May 8th, 2006 at 4:13 am
Im sorry but google is the search engine equivalent of ‘its not what you know but who you know’ mentality. It has always been about links from other sites instead of what you have on your site. This has only helped google as they eventually brought in pay per click advertising on their site, but people like the writer of Jellyfish have spotted it for what it is, a money making scheme just like every other business in the world. And you would be mad to think that google isnt out to make money, that is simply naive. They are the next Micro$oft, mark my words….
May 8th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
It makes sense from a business perspective to thin out the quality of the actual results to make the paid results look better by comparison, but only in the short term. Google can get away with it because the other search engines aren’t even close, yet Google erodes what made them who they are, highly relevant search results. Eventually, people will notice the search results aren’t as useful and move on to someone doing it better. Once mighty search engine giants have been felled due to the same business practices, and made way for Google in the process. Does Google want to make the same mistake?
May 10th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Squarehappy, you made my point for me. Google is NOT that short-sighted.
May 10th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
I think Google should create two sets of results: Not-Filtered (they could call them “100% Organic” and Filtered (”Sorted by Google Popularity”). The default would be the latter one, but when the user wants to see the “organic” results, s/he would be easily able to switch it from the Google home page.
May 13th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
The probable reason the Organic SERPs in the “Printer Cartridges” example was so “muddy” was probably due to their attempt to get 1st page rankings in many other related terms - also
:
doing a search for
Inkjet Cartridges
Ink Jet Cartridges
- and several othere - the same companies are on page One. And one Website is consistantly Number One.
May 16th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
In regards to your post: How Google Profits from Irrelevance —
I love your quip; playing in a system set up to create mud. Now let’s look at another great SEO Google mud-tool, PageRank.
The Google Page Ranking system does not discriminate between novice and professional level websites. Nor does it award Page Rank where editorial decisions are concerned. Case in point: I’ve seen well conceived content pages with 10 to 20 out bound links fare no better in Page Rank than a web site with long lists of mismatched links. Both had Page Ranks of 4 even though there was a remarkable disparity in quality and content. Page Rank is a worthless.
When a large corporation purchases web-based ad space or banner ads, do you think they use the cute little colored Page Rank bar as a measurement?
Emphatically no.
Media buyers look at a web site’s log statistics for viewers and unique viewer’s per hour, day, month and year. It’s the same principle when companies do media buys for broadcast, radio and print. It’s all about how many readers or how many viewers are attracted. Advertisers set their rates by the analysis of this web traffic to include stats for gender, demographics, click through rates, pages visited, length of visit and much more.
Page Rank is a useless metric and little more htan a boy scount badge.
May 27th, 2006 at 3:53 am
In the last couple of years, I’ve compared Google to a chef who made a name for itself by creating a great recipe (SERPS). But as fame and popularity grew, so did the ego. So Chef Google decides that it’s great recipe could be even better…so it starts changing ingredients. This starts all the updates: Update 1 - Let’s add more salt to the recipe, that’ll make it taste really great…oh crap, now it’s too salty. Update 2 - So to offset the salt, let’s add more flour…dang, now it’s too pasty. Update 3 - Ok, add more milk and water to make it less pasty…for crying out loud! It’s so watery, it won’t bake right! Update 4 - Let’s let it bake a little longer to dry up the watery effect…oh great, now it’s burned! And so on…until the recipe just sucks.
June 27th, 2006 at 8:19 am
Great job guys… Thank for you work…
January 21st, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Here is a good article. I recently wrote a very similar one.
But i dont agree 100% with this. I don’t think google wants to make top organic results less relevant. That would drag them down in their popularity. I think google is more interested in keeping things the way they are. Because of the way google indexes sites, a lot of SEO techniques have been developed. Now would be the time to filter these and null them so we get back to content relevance. That’s where i think google is just looking instead of taking action. Google want’s the SEO techniques to work, so everybody does everything to get on top of google, so it still #1 so a lot more sites pay a comercial link.
March 11th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Nice site you have!
March 19th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Great site! Good luck to it’s owner!
February 13th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Printers Survey Results (Inkjet & Laser Printer Reviews and Comparison)
To get a perspective of the best printers in the market, recently PC Mag conducted the Reader’s Choice: Printer’s Survey. After all, who better than the consumer to review which printers are the best! In the Reader’s Choice survey more than 6500 pri…
May 11th, 2008 at 2:47 am
Improved Search Engine Placement
has many similarities to the dot- com days of the late 1990s