Many online businesses don’t do much in the way of marketing. They simply rely on getting good rankings in the Google search results and hope the free traffic pours in. So when Google changes the way it ranks sites in its search results, these companies can lose a large proportion of their customers over night. Actually that’s not quite true – the searchers never find the business’s site, so they don’t ever become customers. Let’s get this straight – Google doesn’t owe anyone a living. Google’s mantra is that it wants to provide the best quality search results to its searchers. To quote from Google :
“A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.”
So how is it that even though Google has the best algorithm on the planet, more computer power than the whole of Russia and the highest density of Ph.Ds anywhere on the planet, Google’s search results can sometimes be so, well, crap? I’m worried for them. Which is why I’ve written this open letter to Google…
Dear Google,
Trust all is well at Google. I’m worried that it might not be 
Recently I’ve noticed a serious downturn in the quality of results for some keywords, like this search for ‘vibrators’. 6 out of the 10 sites on the first page of results are single-page blog spam sites.
Full disclosure – I work for www.lovehoney.co.uk which sells a certain type of ‘vibrator’. We have recently seen our site drop a long way down the search results for searches for terms such as ‘sex toys‘ and ‘vibrators’.
I understand that you don’t owe anyone a living. That’s we we constantly strive to make sure our Web site meets all your Webmaster Guidelines. We have a W3C compliant site, lots of original content, and lots of backlinks from quality sites on the Web.
I also understand that the Google algorithm is in constant flux and that you are always striving to provide the best search results for the people who search on Google.
But I am enormously surprised to see horrendously poor-quality results like the ones below for a single-word search. I am not complaining that our site should be higher (though of course that would be nice ), but that the Google search results are so poor.
6 of the 10 results on the first page for this single-word search are single-page blog-spam sites, of the kind which has been cluttering up the MSN search results for a long time. MSN has rightly been mocked for its poor quality results — it’s really worrying to me as both a searcher and an online retailer that Google’s results are now being polluted in the same way with exceptionally bad sites that are useless to searchers.
These sites fall foul of every single one of your Webmaster guidelines. I would love to know how these blog spam sites can rank so highly on Google.
My theory is that you are trying to present a variety of sites in your results, so you present information sites, news sites and e-commerce sites. That’s great.
As part of this, I’m guessing that you’ve tweaked up your ‘authority site’ filter, so that if an authority site has a page about a keyword, then it will rank higher than a smaller non-authority site that is dedicated to that topic. That would certainly explain why a single-page news story about ’sex toys’ on The Register, an excellent and hugely well-linked computer news site, could rank higher than any of the main sex toys retail Web sites in the UK.
Oh God, I haven’t just compounded the problem by linking to The Register in close proximity to the words ’sex toys’ on this page, have I? GAH! I’ve just done it again!
A knock-on effect of this is that pages on blogspot.com, which is powered by Google’s authority blogging service blogging.com, rank highly because they have some kind of authority trickle-down from the main site.
It’s just a theory and may be well wide of the mark. But as I say, I’m at a loss to understand how these sites can rank so highly when they don’t meet any of your Webmaster guidelines.
What’s better for your searchers? Linking to an authority site because it happens to have a single page on a particularl topic, even though the rest of the site is irrelevant? Or linking to non-authority sites which are totally devoted to that topic?
Thank you for you time,
Richard x
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
IMHO, Google is broken (well at least for these particular terms). Ok Ok great, Google is trying to provide a varied set of results for searches; however, in this case I think they have failed, not necessarily in providing variety, but relevancy.
Richard I agree. Anybody that knows anything about Search Engine Marketing will tell you of the importance of authority on the web, but there must come a point when authority shouldn’t be used in place of relevancy right? Well I think we’ve reached it!
Lets take a wild guess, what’s in the minds of searchers as they search for sex toys? Well ok my guess is that it would be, in the majority of cases, with an intent to purchase (or maybe I’m just biased and people really do want to see a one second video snippet of one.
In all honesty, news about this change is thin on the ground leaving most site owners baffled. Perhaps it’s temporary, or pehaps it’s here to stay like MSN’s skewed results. Then again, maybe this goes deeper than we think!
You had better find that Adwords login Richard!
Google is making it interesting, that’s for sure — would it be a conspiracy theory to suggest that they’re doing it just to increase their AdWords revenue at Christmas?
Can you say that Richard? Oh you just did