Since Panda and Penguin many smaller sites have been de-ranked to favor brand sites, the so-called authority sources Google believes that people want to find. But you don’t need to search for Walmart to find Walmart, you don’t need to search for BBC to find the BBC…
Google manipulates people into believing that Panda and Penguin were implemented “for the good of search,” and many webmasters follow Google’s “More guidance on building high-quality sites” guidelines religiously, however without any results. And the issue with Penguin drives webmasters to madness, pushing them to send “link removal requests” in an effort to please Google, hoping to regain their rankings in the SERPs.
In the meanwhile, scraper sites rank way ahead of original sources, and Google keeps a blind eye to publisher complaints. Not only this, but many times they insult your intelligence with statements such as:
“we use well over 200 factors in crawling, indexing, and ranking, and it’s always good to work on the small things as well. When looking at the bigger picture, it’s useful to really take a step back, and to try to see what could be changed overall to improve the quality of the content (when it comes to our algorithms), especially with regards to the content that’s indexed”
If that were true, no scrapers could ever rank ahead of an original source. Identifying the original source should be easy for Google – it used to be before Panda.
Panda and Penguin were not implemented for the good of search, but for the good of Google. You have to consider things carefully: search is what Google relies on for revenue (a complex integration of AdWords and Google own products that drives ROI). Search is Google’s bread and butter, the main channel that drives users to Google’s other products. Therefore, search needs to be tweaked to maximize Google’s profits.
The crappy search results of 2012 were a calculated risk. Many users will turn to Bing and other search engines to find better results, however very few. Google’s market share in search is in no danger. People are beings of habit, and Google is so deeply ingrained in their habits, that is even synonymous with “research.”
But the migration will happen, albeit slowly, and by the time Bing will wise up to capitalize on Google’s lack of commitment to smaller publishers, Google will breed its new business model to perfection. New business model? Indeed. Instead of being a search engine, Google would have you now consider it a publisher, with rights similar to those of newspapers. Google would like you to consider search results “published content,” material protected by the US First Amendment. This means that Google is free to tweak search results in any manner it pleases. This is how it’s all explained in a White Paper commissioned by Google to Mayer Brown LLP:
Each search engine’s editorial judgment is much like many other familiar editorial judgments:
- newspapers’ daily judgments about which wire service stories to run, and whether they are to go “above the fold”;
- newspapers’ periodic judgments about which op-ed columnists, lifestyle, columnists, business columnists, or consumer product columnists are worth carrying regularly, and where their columns are to be placed;
- guidebooks’ judgments about which local attractions, museums, stores, and restaurants to mention, and how prominently to mention them;
- the judgment of sites such as DrudgeReport.com about which stories to link to, and in what order to list them.
[...] And all these exercises of editorial judgment are fully protected by the First Amendment.
The discourse makes sense if you are willing to accept that Google may use your work – your copyrighted content – at will. Because what the paper in cause doesn’t tell you, is that not even Google has the right to publish spinets of your content without permission. Sure, you could block Google from indexing your site, but scrapers stealing your original content will still rank in Google’s SERPs. And here’s where things get complicated. It’s a grey area that Google knows how to exploit for its own benefit.
Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations
Google Search Results Are Garbage