Google listings, aaa, and playing fair

Category: Technology

Published: 07/13/2009 08:40 a.m.

This is mostly a response to the whinings of an anonymous CEO. If I had written that, I'd want to pull my name from it too.

The article I am referencing focuses on how much Google controls the traffic of the internet. The main arguments by the CEO are that:

1. Google is not transparent in it's algorithm, and it should be to be fair.
2. You can't just buy your way into the market with ads, and this is bad.
3. To rank highly, you have to cheat or hire someone expensive.
4. Google is #1, and it is the main source of traffic for everyone's website.
5. Google should be regulated so that it's results aren't constantly putting people out of business.

Seriously. This is ridiculous. Let's look at a few offline cases to see if this guy is just all confused because of the internet and all of it's tubes.

The Yellow Pages. Before everyone used Google, they used this big yellow book that had numbers and addresses of everything. Need a plumber? Check the yellow pages. Hungry for Thai? Check the yellow pages. The yellow pages were where all the consumers were, so it became where all the businesses were too. And, in the ways of snowball building, more consumers came.

For it's ads, the yellow pages sold a section of it's page at a cost per square inch. The bigger your ad, the more you paid. I don't know the specifics on whether costs varied per business or not, but I would guess not much. So, if you had lots of money to spend, you could purchase some attention with a bigger ad.

If you didn't have the big budget, then you have to be more creative. This is when gaming the system first started. Noticing that the listings were all alphabetical, there were several business owners that changed the name of their businesses. And, the AAA businesses were born. This way, they were listed first. So if someone needed immediate help and didn't know a thing, they were probably more likely to choose the first one listed.

Not only did this type of gaming happen to the yellow pages, but it affected the political process. In this research note, you will see evidence of candidates going so far as to change their last names in order to secure the valuable top slot. (I recall in college seeing a video of a small town that had 146 mayoral candidates every year with names like aaSmith and aThomas). And just like in the yellow pages , the top spot is chosen more often.This same behavior takes place on Google, but it's a bit different.

Google, more so than the yellow pages, decided it's customer was the searchers, not the businesses. So it doesn't rank it's results alphabetically. It uses complex algorithms based on web standards to rank it's results, starting with the best results.

Let's take a look at an example of three widget companies

• Company A: been making widgets for 50 years. Won lots of industry awards. Just got their first website last year.
• Company B: been making widgets for 10 years. Smaller than A, more local. They have had a website for 6 years, and regularly update it. It conforms to standards.
• Company C: been making widgets for 1 year. They use a new process to make them better, faster, cheaper. Just took their website live. They have a ton of $$$ for ads.

All three claim their widgets to be better than the other two, and have some sort of evidence (testimonials, review papers, etc.) to back up their claim.

As a consumer who wants widgets, what site will I find when I search for them in Google? Probably Company B. Why? Because it's Google's job to me, the searcher, to produce the best results possible. They show Company B because:

• They have been around longer than the others.
• They update their site.
• They conform to web standards.

(By conforming to standards I mean they have proper use of Title, H1, and Meta tags. You can call these SEO standards, but they are also web standards.)

Now if I am the CEO of Company A or C, I am mad because I know our product is better. I may even call Google and tell them to fix it so that we rank first.

Fortunately, Google doesn't much listens to complaints like this. It instead tweaks it's algorithm to trust the web. The search results are based not only on your site's content, but on how your site is referenced by others. Thus the name, Organic, meaning unaltered and natural.

Another point that is missed by most people (like this CEO), is that Google ranks Websites, not businesses. There is a key difference that is easy to miss. They rank ads partially on their CTR, which is a quality indicator. If your site isn't ranking well, it means that the other sites are better. What makes them better is a long list of SEO-related items like tags, longevity, and content.

Think of your website as a race car. If you were to buy a Ford Escort, you wouldn't win many races. If you buy a Corvette, but neglect to purchase good gasoline and fail to maintain it, it will run slower than others. Even if you can afford the Ferrari of websites, you still need someone to carefully drive it so it doesn't crash. And on the small end, a cheaper, self-customized and tuned Honda Civic will require lots of extra work and attention, but even it too can compete with the big boys.

So, think about what kind of site you have before you go whining to Google that they aren't listing you first.

Google wins because it cares about the searchers first. Because you run a business, you want Google to care about you more. But they don't have to. They have the market share and the momentum and frankly, they don't need you at all. You desperately need them. So what do you do? You have to play by their rules. Fortunately for consumers, Google has a great set of rules to protect against weak businesses with lots of ad money to spend.

Consumers vote with their searches, and they are searching on Google. And businesses have to play by the rules to get their web pages to rank. It all sounds pretty fair to me, and I will happily continue to use Google.