Thursday 29 November 2012

Google is Broken!

Google is broken, and it's killing small businesses and giving it's customers the wrong results. You want an example? I could give you plenty, but here's just one; I searched for 'Top locations to buy a house 2013', now because you probably wouldn't believe me if I told you what results I found, here is a visual for you...

Yep, thats right, I got given a page, (infact 2 pages!) about best honeymoon and holiday destinations and travel tips, not a single relevant page (and no I was not signed in for personal results!).

Google used to be the word for integrity and the best searches you can do on-line I'm worried that now it has built it's brand to a big enough proportion it doesn't care anymore and has become just a money-hungry beast like all the other big corporations.
If your thinking I'm some Google basher, who is bitter because Google threw my site down the rankings and isn't letting me back up to that number 1 spot, well you are kindof right, but there is much more to it than that.
Over the last month I have been doing everything I possibly can and everything that Google tells you to do to get your site back on the first page, perfecting on page keyword %'s, getting more quality and relevant backlinks, creating more content and generally following all the whitehat Google guidelines and rules, I have got nowhere.  Meanwhile, I have been keeping an eye on my competition, one in particular. Now I'm not going to mention their name as I would rather not give them the free publicity but if you Google pretty much anything to do with 'Logo Quiz' they will come up first in the SERP (search engine results page). They are easy to spot, they are the site with almost no content.
I decided to dig a little deeper into this site, some of the big SEO advice out there is to check your competitors links, I did, and what I found was shocking, here are some facts:
  • Website creation date: 19th September 2012
  • Number of backlinks: (on 28th October 2012)  57000+ 
  • Any relevant backlinks? No, backlinks were from sites about Salmon Fishing and Ballet to name just two.
  • Keyword %'s: All over the place, but for the keywords 'logo quiz answers' around 11%.
  • How did they do this: That's exactly what I wanted to know! So I found out....

They are hackers! I didn't have to dig deep to discover this on a Joomla forum:

This is the link if you want to see the whole forum discussion


What the hackers had done is embed a dofollow link to their site in the head of this poor guys website, thus giving them a free backlink. They must have an automatic software they did this 57000 times over, and with most site owners likely not even checking for any extra code, or if they did, like this guy they wouldn't know what to do with it, this gives the hackers a tidy amount of backlinks.
So well done hackers, you got your free backlinks, but hang-on, surely Google is clever enough to figure out that this is a hack, that something fishy is going on?
Well judging by the SERPs, apparently not, there's not even a prospect of the Google dance going on anymore as these hackers have been solidly sitting at number one for the past 6 weeks.
Surely Google has the intelligence to see this, so why are they not doing anything about it? Money. They want more money, which they make a lot of through selling advertising through Adwords.
Adwords is ridiculous  you pay more per click then you could ever justify, but for small businesses who have been shot down the rankings and over taken by hackers it is now the only option to be seen. So, actually clever Google, more money in you tax dodging pocket.
What about the rest of us? Trying our hardest to play by the rules and be good SEO's? Well time will tell, there needs to be another BIG Penguin update to sieve out all these bad guys, when that comes, if the bad guys are still at the top, well then there is only one explanation, Google have gone to the dark side, they can't beat em', so they're joining them and using the hackers to make themselves a pretty penny. Once again, googlebye small businesses, make way for the big corporations.
Sad world.

As an extra, you can do you're own little experiment to see just how broken Google is; we all do at least one Google search per day, so when that time in the day comes to do your search, instead of clicking on the first result and assuming it will be the best, go onto page two, an really have a look, I bet you'll find a better result for whatever it is you're searching for! I have personally been experimenting with this, and have found that approx 7 out of 10 times, the results on page 2 are more relevant, about 1 out of 10 times the first result is relevant and the rest is somewhere in the middle to lower end of page one.
I'm off to Bing!

1 comment:

  1. and yes I am aware of the irony that I am using a google based blogging system!

    ReplyDelete