My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her | Hacker News Reader

My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

cringely.com

72 pointsprotomyth111 comments

Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.

Now I’m angry.

Wow. I think I respect Google more now. I don't like the "take it to the people" approach needed to get action out of Google, but I like "I know people who know people" approach even less. The chairman of the company should not be dicking about with search results because a friend asked.

Yeah, it seems pretty pathetic to get upset that you can't get preferential treatment through personal connections.

Except he could have given some helpful hint...

In reality, he couldn't. There are likely several million sites that are wondering about their Google page ranking as well. Figure several thousand of them know someone who knows someone who knows Eric Schmidt. From a practical standpoint, how many hours are in the day and how many do you think he should devote to such activities? From a fairness perspective, is it fair that you give inside Google information to someone because they're an acquaintance of an acquaintance?

Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help. Now I’m angry.

This line strikes me as very similar to the person who makes a scene in a restaurant when they can't get a table right away. "Don't you know who I am?! My sister has the former #1 Photo Quilting business online!"

The real problem is not that they couldn't get preferential treatment. The problem is that there is no way to get treatment at all. If they hadn't have asked Eric Schmidt, then we could have wondered whether they had really tried everything. Since they did, it's obvious that Google simply has a problem that they're not interested in fixing.

And apparently Mr Cringely doesn't know anything about Webmaster Tools, which would probably be the first stop of anyone wanting to know about a sudden change in rank.

Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction' so I'm guessing that somewhere there was an action. Did she succumb to some black hat SEO marketing pitch? Did Cringely piss off some black hat SEO person? Did her site get compromised and have malware installed? Did she not actually update the content for the last 5 years (including Copyright notice) so it doesn't appear to be a dead site.

The 'OMG I don't show up in results' is a good starting point but hardly the ending point of these stories.

>Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction'

This is not necessarily true and I have plenty of first hand experience. Also Webmaster tools is useless if they were not directly affected by a spam penalty.

You're talking out of your ass and it's really infuriating to hear people disregard real, tangible problems you are facing.

Google makes software, and no software is perfect. I've been bitten by shitty google services before. My most recent sting was Google Webmaster Tools not showing any Googlebot crawls to me website. My website is very niche and literally 1 of 4 competitors in the same arena.

5 month. 5 MONTHS. and google has yet to crawl my website, even though google analytics shows me stats day in day out.

Why? Google breaks sometimes, and it's incredibly crappy that you can't even reach out to someone to ask what's up.

I'd contend you're the one talking out of their ass.

Relying on another company for all your business isn't a sound business strategy. The person in the article put all their eggs in one basket and this is the result.

In principle, I'd agree that relying on another company is not a sound business strategy, but Google has a virtual stranglehold on organic traffic to websites, something that is outside the control of most web companies.

How do you suggest a web-based company should counter that and not rely on google for much of their business?

Marketing? You know, advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc.

But that costs money!

;)

Many of those channels rely on guiding people to search engines, or at the very least being findable on search engines by name. To take this example, your website is called portrait quilts, the url is http://portraitquilts.com/ - so you do loads of advertising on twitter, print media, word of mouth etc, and people try to find your site. You can try to guide them to a unique url, but often people won't remember urls, but names, and are encouraged to use this method by the blurring of urls and keyword searches in browsers.

So they open up their browser, type portrait quilts in the address bar, which redirects to a search, and your website is on page 8 despite being an exact match on the search. Game Over.

Seems your other channels are not quite as effective as you thought if google decides to penalise or blacklist your site. If you're off page 1 or 2 you may as well not exist. Of course from Google's point of view, you'll just have to advertise with google, so this doesn't penalise them at all, in fact they are rewarded monetarily for arbitrarily shifting rankings periodically (not that I'm suggesting that they go out of their way to do this, just that the perverse incentive is there).

One free thing you can do to optimize marketing is to not name your business a generic term. If your business has a unique name you generally don't have to worry about competitors outranking you for the name. For example, I don't think my brother will ever get outranked for "porcelain rocket"; he currently owns not just the top spot but the entire first page.

Plenty of products/services like Windows, Xerox, tipex start as generic terms or become them during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they should therefore always come first, but it's instructive if you compare xerox to this website - they dominate the entire first page of google results. What should come first is what would be useful for end users, and I think it's fair to expect a company named after and with an url of a phrase to come at least once on that first page, if lots of people link to them (as from other search engine results they appear to). If that's not the case, Google should be transparent about why these penalties are applied. I understand why they don't want to be transparent for commercial reasons and to stop people gaming the system, but think given their monopoly position it behoves them to be so. Otherwise they can destroy businesses maliciously or, even worse, with complete indifference.

Personally I find Google is providing results which are less and less useful, with their recent emphasis on monetising search, indifference to fairness, and lack of transparency as to their ranking methods - it certainly seems as if in this case a draconian penalty has been applied, and there is no effective way to appeal or even find out what the judgement against them was (webmasters very often is not helpful). A penalty of a few places would be completely understandable if they don't like this site for whatever reason, a penalty of 8 pages while other spammy results dominate search terms is not.

I've switched to DuckDuckGo for now and it's pretty good. Compare the results for Tipex (a popular brand of correction fluid in Europe) for example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipex https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipex

The brand is "Tipp-Ex".

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipp-ex

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipp-ex&oq=tipp-ex&gs_l=se...

http://www.bing.com/search?q=tipp-ex&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&filt...

http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=tipp-ex&lr=87

http://www.dogpile.com/search/web?fcoid=417&fcop=topnav&fpid...

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=An3Le.5YQeHZ499qBVnAQ...

Thanks.

This is trivializing to the point of absurdity. When it comes to doing business on the Internet in the English-speaking world, Google is the basket. It's the only basket. I wish it weren't, but it is.

And so, yes, pretty much everyone is reliant on them to be good stewards of the power they possess. (Whether they are or not is orthogonal to that the quilter in question has a pretty good reason to feel like they aren't.)

I really can't agree with that. We've built businesses in the pre-Google days when search engines were a hit or miss affair.

Except that now everyone goes to Google. It's not just a search engine, it's literally the starting point for the overwhelming majority of web traffic.

If Google is against you, you're done.

Hello friend. You seem angry so I'm going to attempt to tread lightly as I throw some friendly suggestions out.

1. Do you have a verified valid robots.txt that Google can read?

2. Does your verified valid robots.txt point to a verified valid sitemap or sitemap index?

3. Did your submit your verified valid sitemap or sitemap index to Google Webmaster Tools?

Based on the responses to this, I or someone else might be able to help you further. Good luck to you.

I'm not angry, just trying to drive a point home using colorful language.

1. Yes, I have that. 2. Yes, I also have that.

3. Here's an actual screenshot of my google webmaster tools for my website:

http://i.imgur.com/9Nwgts1.png

Remember: We're now closing in on 6 months with Google just not crawling my site whereas other search engines crawl near daily.

Two other pieces of information would be great here.

1) What is the URL in question.

2) When you click the 'why not' link what does it say?

The other (possibly not relevant) question is whether or not you have any Google advertising or not on your site. I'm not suggesting that there is a 'pay for play' here, what I'm looking at is that when you use 'AdsenseForContent' or (AfC) the only way Google can know what sort of ads would make sense on your page is to crawl them first. If you had AfC ads on your page and Google wasn't crawling them, then that would suggest that your URLs are black listed for some reason. At Blekko our crawler tries to avoid sites that are either patently malicious (they've got known exploits in their pages) or on a list of malware/childporn sites, or have complex page structures that don't involve recursive crawling loops.

What is the URL of your site?

My url is: http://www.smitecamp.com

And what is your relationship to https://www.hirezstudios.com/smitegame/home ? I ask because it seems like you share a lot of material. Game studios get a bit twitchy about that when it isn't part of their PR plan.

Hmm, if that were the case I'd expect it to show up in the Transparency report though.

Your robots.txt is nothing but comments. It doesn't specify the URL of your sitemap. It does have a blanket disallow for all user agents for the root of your site. It is commented out (like everything else) but if that was ever uncommented that could be your problem.

I guessed your sitemap URL since it isn't in your robots.txt. You have every single page listed as being updated hourly. Even if that is true I wouldn't put that in there.

(I work at Google on webmaster issues) Your site has a manual spam action probably based on something a previous owner had on it ( https://web.archive.org/web/20110202220759/http://smitecamp.... shows scraped Yahoo Answers content). You can see that in Webmaster Tools under Search Traffic / Manual Actions. Submitting a reconsideration request should do the trick.

Try posting it to Google Plus, you should get crawled instantly (not necessarily indexed though).

Some things that may explain things:

According to ahrefs, the number of referring pages (a big factor search results) dropped from about 22k pages to well under 1k over the course of 2 months starting at the end of march (source: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.por...).

Additionally, it seems the site does show up in Google search results on the 10th page (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=photo%20quilts#h...).

I'll be honest, I don't understand what exactly that means, but it seems to have happened at around the same timeframe that you're referring to (5 or 6 months ago), so I'm going to bet it's a factor.

Hope you figure it out - the whole search engine algorithm thing is really complex.

But, honestly, I don't believe that Google just stopped working for a single domain. The more likely scenario is that something you/your sister is unaware of changed and had a large negative result.

> Did she not actually update the content for the last 5 years (including Copyright notice) so it doesn't appear to be a dead site.

That's a function of inaction however.

Moral: don't base your income on something as volatile as your Google ranking

That's a pretty unrealistic moral in the face of the reality of how the consumer web works.

I mean, I get the whole "don't depend on another company for your revenue" (e.g. apps in the Apple app store), but you're saying "don't count on Google sending traffic to your site".

Plus, her ranking didn't change -- her site vanished out of the index.

EDIT: Unless you mean "don't depend entirely on organic traffic"? I can sorta see that... but, again, if I've only now thought about putting a photo on a quilt (which is a new idea to me), around 70% of the US thinks putting [photo quilts] into Google is the way to get the site you want. What else would you suggest?

EDIT #2: Maybe "vanished" is too strong a word, since it does show up on string matches. But it was deindexed for search terms it used to rank for.

How did you infer the site was deindexed? They said specifically by typing the URL of the site, it would show up.

From the site:

"...but if you look for photo quilts or any similar search term, Portrait Quilts — which for years was always the top result — no longer appears."

I'm being a little imprecise, but her site was deindexed for a bunch of search terms that she used to rank highly for.

based on how misinformed the author was in general on the subject, I think its more likely the site dropped off the first few pages of results. Since it still came up when you search for the domain, it can't be deindexed.

Again, apologies for the imprecision. But you'd agree that it has been delisted for search terms it used to do well for?

Additionally, far less than <1% of the people who use Google get past the second page of results. Getting your ranking penalized by twenty spots is a death sentence.

The site did not vanish. Go search for a snippet of text on the site, and it shows up right there.

Edit: Even for "portrait quilts" in quotes, her site shows up on the 8th page for me (opened incognito window to limit customization).

That's interesting data. Incognito ["portrait quilts"] and it doesn't rank on the first two pages for me, which is why I felt safe putting in my comment in the first place.

Maybe it's a quibble, but most humans don't put quotes in their search terms.

I wonder if they tried to resubmit their site to the index?

What's wrong with Google's search results? If I search for any of these terms, I get plenty of relevant results.

The article is just idiotic in its accusations. Google wants to provide the best search experience for customers. If it makes a mistake, it hurts Google, so I'd imagine they sorta try to keep their results as good as possible. Complaining that you moved in indexes seems sorta pointless. Google's algorithms, at the moment, think other sites are a better match. Maybe she unknowingly engaged in some blacklistable offense.

It's like complaining that some hotel concierge stopped referring people to your restaurant.

That was never my point. In fact, I didn't say anything was "wrong" with the results at all. I just pointed out that saying "that's what you get for depending on Google for organic traffic" is more like saying "that's what you get for depending on oxygen" web-wise. It just ignores the reality of the web today.

It's safe to say, at this point, that we don't know why her site isn't showing up for the common terms it showed up for before.

EDIT: This comment has some good info on why her site might've been penalized: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6891141

True, that would be an inaction.

I disagree with your moral though, a moral would suggest a choice, and it would be difficult to not depend on Google for exposure here since they are the dominant source of identification. It is perhaps a poor choice to depend on Google for 'organic' exposure however.

A quick 2-minute check shows that yes, indeed the site violates Google guidelines. If you check the backlinks using any number of checkers (Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO) you can find a number of over-optimized 'unnatural' backlinks residing on spammy link-exchange pages in clear violation of Google's guidelines. The only reason to place links on these pages would be to try to rise higher in Google's search results.

Yes, it feels unfair when Google drops you in search results, and Google has changed the rules over the years and it's hard to keep up with shifting guidelines.

In truth, the website can recover from this. The same people who placed spammy links on 3rd party sites in order to manipulate rankings are probably savvy enough to mount a clean up effort to get those links removed and/or file a disavow request with Google (which basically tells them to ignore those links)

Ironically, Eric Schmidt once tried to scrub Google of unfavorable search results about himself, and he was told they do not do that for individual results. ;)

The crappy part about this is that people can do this to sink competitors. Why bother lowering your prices? Just spend a few hundred dollars to have spammers plaster links to competitors on hacked sites... :(

This is a report going into detail about the site and the violations to Googles terms with regards manipulative links:

http://linkaudit.co.uk/blog/did-cringely-call-out-google-as-...

I see a lot of these articles; someone feeling cheated because Google takes them off some or all search results. Google did not "mug" anyone - it is the reason for your traffic to begin with. The fact that you even ever had discoverability among a billion or so websites is a beautiful thing. Additionally, have some perspective, the search is a free tool that is very tough to get right. This might sound harsh, but I believe the effort in complaining could be better allocated into promoting the authors' sister's business. To emphasize, Google search is a FREE tool - use it to get business but don't make it your bread and butter because it is optimized for users, advertisers - not the content creators. To accept this is not optional, it is simply reality.

>it is the reason for your traffic to begin with

No, people searching for "photo quilts" are the reason for the traffic. Most of those people happen to be using Google, but if Google disappeared, they would switch to another search engine. The site owner has a legitimate interest in Google doing its job better, and so do we as Google users. The point of this post is that Google isn't serving anyone's interests properly here (except, perhaps, its own). As a Google user, I want to know that.

> The point of this post is that Google isn't serving anyone's interests properly here

I'm not sure about that. When I search for "photo quilts", I find plenty of relevant sites. They seem to be at least as good as www.portraitquilts.com.

I would say Google is doing a fine job serving it's user's interests.

It might just be that www.portraitquilts.com isn't as relevant as the other results.

In one sense you are correct that Google is "free" because one does not pay cash directly to Google to be listed in its results or to preform a search.

But in another sense, Google is not free at all. The fact is, Google lives and thrives off of the data generated by the public. Yes, Google employees smart people. But its real value is derived from the underlying public data that Google gets- for free.

Google search works because the world allows Google's bots to traverse their websites freely and index their content. Google translate works because the EU and other governments translated their documents into many languages and then gave them away to the world. Google Maps works because of GIS information gathered on the public's dime. Gmail is able to operate because users allow it to mine their personal messages to better tailor advertisements.

Google is built on top of and depends on the public- both to be its customers and to be the source of its products. It has taken the market in search, email, browser, and mobile. And, for the most part, it has created some great tools for people to use. But there is a minority of people whose lives are affected by Google for the worse. Its important not to marginalize these people.

This is a non-democratically elected institution whose policies and actions have more effect on people's lives than the governments of many nations. Those policies and actions ought to be looked upon critically by the people.

Google does not get its data for free - what do you think the 50,000 people employed there are doing? The vast number of servers, the ridiculous power bill, the research efforts - all these are so they can not only gather the same data that any of us can also gather with a simple bash script, but also present it in such a way that is significantly "better" than the competition that some people are actually willing to pay them money.

The vast majority of Google employees are not downloading public data or working on Googlebot. They are working on either converting public data into better advertising algorithms or creating a product that will capture peoples' attention.

Yes, it is true that Google pays a lot for infrastructure to download the data. But it is a drop in the well compared to the price of actually generating the data. Otherwise they would just do that.

Free has nothing to do with it. Even if you paid Google to be included in the index, Google's results indicate Google's current opinion.

There's no useful, natural, way to order search results. They are an opinion. If Google wanted to, they could randomize results every day or query just to see what people prefer. No one is owed any particular result. Users are literally asking Google what Google feels is a good answer to a query.

Spent a few minutes looking at the site. Looks to me like it was hit by Google's Penguin 2.0 update [1] that targeted sites that had low quality links pointing in to their domain (in particular inner pages).

Probably not the sisters fault, but the site has done a lot of reciprocal linking in the past which Google really frowns upon nowadays. There's prominent page on her site featuring some of those links: http://www.portraitquilts.com/info/links

She also has some links from pages that are selling or exchange links to spam/escort sites:

http://www.iwr.com/gifts/crafts.html http://www.livebusinessradio.com/trade/recip.cgi

Again, probably not her fault. Google is doing their job but with so much misinformation about SEO and link building out there it is easy for people to accidentally get themselves in trouble.

If anybody is curious, I used ahrefs to pull in the backlinks to the site: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains/subdomains/www.p...

There are some other examples of link spam in there. Penguin would be my guess after a quick check.

[1]http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2279845/Googles-Penguin...

That is insightful

Another site that was intended to raise her page rank, but in the end got her site blacklisted:

http://www.linkstrategy.com/links/home-furniture-specialty-u...

For the curious:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=portrait+quilts https://duckduckgo.com/?q=photo+quilts

http://www.bing.com/search?q=portrait+quilts http://www.bing.com/search?q=photo+quilts

http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=portrait+quilts http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=photo+quilts

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=portrait+quilts http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=photo+quilts

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=portrait+quilts http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=photo+quilts

Or even https://blekko.com/#?q=portrait%20quilts and https://blekko.com/#?q=photo%20quilts

EDIT: By the way, the reason we have this site lower than other engines is that we tend to put howto and non-selling sites over selling sites.

Too many, didn't click: (the result order for me; yours may vary)

    DDG:    1 2
    Bing:   1 2 (but ads before)
    Yandex: 1 3
    Baidu:  1 2
    Yahoo:  1 2 (but so much ads/images/cruft before)
    Blekko: 3 x

> Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.

This is a good thing. It's incredibly frustrating that Google has no way for people to get help with the search engine. Allowing the few people who happen to know someone who knows someone to get help doesn't make Google any less frustrating in this situation - although it does help that one person.

It would be interesting to learn why the site got delisted (if it did). Often someone complains vociferously, then a Googler points out all the weird SEO links that exist for that domain, and a bunch of odd things happening on the site.

Has this sister ever engaged in any dubious SEO practices, such as hiring "backlink providers" on fiverr, spamming her link on unrelated websites, or too much prolific use of using the anchor text of "portrait quilt"? Any of those will signal to Google that they are unnatural links and as a result, the site can be penalized and show up less in results, sometimes being removed altogether.

I apologize if this comment is too obvious -- I have worked as an SEO consultant for a while. The first thing she should do is check her Google Webmaster Tools, as this is where she will receive any unnatural link warnings. If it is there, she can start taking steps to remedy the situation by undoing any of the questionable SEO tactics she may have used, and request reconsideration from Google.

This is pretty interesting. So I can theoretically bring down a competitor's rank by creating spammy websites and providing unnatural backlinks ? Even if the competitors figure it out from the webmaster tools, they will have no way to remove the backlinks. Right ?

Backlinks can be disavowed via Webmaster Tools.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2309486/Matt-Cutts-Use-...

> Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.

> Now I’m angry.

I would be more angry if Eric Schmid had helped. Because not everyone whose website gets de-indexed knows someone who knows a buddy of Eric Schmidt.

So at least it stays equally shit for everyone and there's no two-tier society of website owners divided by Silicon Valley real life contacts.

This is more of a story about the danger of relying on search ranking than it is about Google abusing anyone.

Presumably Cringely knows this, but he also knows that carping loudly about it will increase portraitquilts.com's Google rankings.

Unfortunately, this is a zero-sum game. If portraitquilts.com deserves to win, then that's also saying that the other businesses, how-to sites, Pinterest boards, and so on deserve to lose. Is that obviously true?

I think it is quite terrifying, that one company can singlehandedly shut down business, even if you have never used a Google service in your entire life; because all your customers only discover you through Google. And what is to be done about it? you aren't a Google customer in the direct sense, so they feel no obligation to assist, and it seems as if even actual customers get negligible support. The only way out of this seems to be either Google collapsing, or a MS-esque antitrust/monopoly court.

Let's say I own a single store and it happens to be in a space in a mall. Also, the mall is letting me do business there for free. I get exposure, electricity, easy access, all kinds of good stuff, for free. (The mall is Google)

Suddenly the mall wants to extort me by charging me money to use their space, electricity, water, etc. Those jerks!

Does Google let you buy search result placement? Not ads, but better placement in search results?

Completely missing the problem.

The problem i'm talking about is more in the case of some company distributing a large phonebook for the city, which includes all stores and people, information they gathered by downloading public city records.

So people start using this phonebook all the time, and for most citizens, it's the only way they can find your business.

But on day the phonebook company, decides for an uknown reason to delist a business.

When the store then contacts the phone company, they are reached with a voicemail, every time they try to contact. The store knows some friends who know the owner of the phonebook company, but the guy they know refuse to comment on it.

What the hell is the store supposed to do? The entire city is so hooked on the phonebook company, because they give them free phone lines, and all sorts of seemingly free stuff, which is really just feeding drugs to the addict.

How does this not stink far away of antitrust? The phonebook is actively working to keep its users with free stuff, so that they keep using them, and enables them to extort the phone store to have to pay the phonebook company for getting them listed again.

That's not accurate at all. The phonebook doesn't provide any useful ranking - it's an alphabetical sort usually. It's closer to a factual database than anything. Google could solve all criticism of its results simply by returning all URLs in alphabetical order -- but they'd lose all their users, too.

The situation is much more akin to a hotline to call up and ask what a good place is for Q. And usually the hotline refers people to your business for Q, but now they don't. And since the hotline is part of a massive organization and answers are generated by a massive, complicated, AI, it's hard to find out why the hotline decided to not refer people to your business anymore.

I don't think I'm missing the problem at all. The problem is that that average business trusts Google way too much. They think Google is some kind of free public service. They're putting all their eggs in Google's basket. They should know that Google is heavily invested in the basket business.

It is terrifying, but it is the nature of Google. If your customers found you through Google it's important to keep them through other means.

Furthermore, as more people are involved with online businesses they need to understand the ebb and flow of Google traffic. It can be turned off overnight. I don't think people realize that until it's too late.

Dude, that site is riddled with out-dated and now black-hat seo tricks. It was just asking to be blacklisted.

Get that cheater off my SERPs, I wanna go with the honest portrait quilt providers.

any examples?

If I recall correctly, the latest change Google made to PageRank penalizes her for using meta tags the way she does.

edit: Also just realized she doesn't have a robots.txt.

edit2: Gauthier's comment (December 11, 2013 at 7:24 am) on that article sums up the problems pretty well.

First off I know nothing about SEO as will likely be apparent from my comment, that said.

As someone who knows nothing about SEO it looks to me like it could of triggered duplicate content detection portion of a google algorithm.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Looking briefly at the source she has the entirety of the following in the title of every page other than the main page I looked at Portrait Quilts - Memory Photo Quilts with up to 96 Photos! Personalized Memory Quilts, Picture Quilts and Photo Blankets

info - Portrait Quilts - Memory Photo Quilts with up to 96 Photos! Personalized Memory Quilts, Picture Quilts and Photo Blankets

and half of it in the title of the main page

It seems like some maintenance could be order for the site.

Really, "mugged"? Google walked up to her on the street and threatened her with a weapon?

The sad part is that I was expecting that maybe there was a snafu with Google's NFC payments, or the Wallet, or maybe Google Shopping algorithm or something.

Google used to give her a bunch of web traffic, arguably for free, and now they apparently have stopped, possibly with good reason, possibly without. And that is somehow stealing?

I'm sympathetic to the plight of having lost revenue, but that revenue was never guaranteed, nor was it owed, nor should she have allowed Google to be her sole source of traffic.

The percentage of traffic provided by google is largely outwith the control of websites - the users of the search engine decide how much traffic they send through google.

"Allowed Google to have been her sole source of traffic?"

It's one of the realities of the world we live in that Google - if you're popular on it at all - will likely dwarf any other traffic you're pulling in, despite any other efforts you may make.

Further, it's important to note that effort spent on optimizing your Google ranking is usually an order of magnitude more effective than time spent optimizing for any other search engine. For people with very limited time outside of their primary activity, you've got to prioritize.

(That said, the rest of your comment was spot-on. I just felt the last part of the last sentence didn't really reflect a few key realities, is all.)

Compared to free traffic, I'd agree. What I was trying to say was that, if traffic is so important to one's business, one should try securing it... but even that isn't really valid since, why would you spend money on something that you're getting so much of already, but for free, especially in a business that doesn't scale.

Either way, Google's organic traffic results are probably replaceable through purchased clicks, and I'm guessing the proprietor appreciates the value of it more than what they otherwise might have, so who knows? Maybe all the free traffic is just Google's upsell.

"You remember all that traffic you used to get? You can have it all again, for just $149 a month."

Reminds me a bit of the recent article on the rise and fall of the content farm Demand Media: http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall... (worth a read).

Someone was recently telling me that "diversity of traffic sources" is a key metric they use to evaluate digital media properties. There's a real risk in basing your whole business on organic Google traffic.

Sorry for the author's sister, but it's kinda reassuring to know that even Google's CEO won't tamper with the results algorithm. Which might or might not be fair, but still...

It's the unfortunate reality, I honestly feel like Google's algorithm has gotten really arbitrary lately (just had a huge drop off of almost all traffic for a month which was completely unexplained, only to come right back a few weeks later). The fact that they hide keywords now will make it seem all the more arbitrary.

The real world comparison is not a mugging, it's as if your small business was on Main St one day, and the next there are literally no roads to get to you.

Comes up first for me - https://www.google.com/#q=portrait+quilts

Edit: HA! Sorry, it's an ad! I thought it was the first organic result but it was actually the second ad!

I can barely perceive that shade of yellow indicating that it's an ad. Took two or three takes.

Doesn't come up on page 1 at all for me for photo or portrait quilts.

edit: An ad for portraitquilts.com shows up first in the ads sidebar, though.

It isn't in the search results for me, but there is an ad for portraitquilts.com. So i guess they bit the bullet and paid for advertising.

It's an ad for me. Of course, Google's been doing all it can to make ads look like organic results. Looks like she bought into the protection racket.

Maybe you're being funny, but it's scary to think that google has a quiet policy of letting businesses develop revenues through organic search and then intentionally changing the algos.

It's often interesting to perform the same search on google.com using different proxies. Sometimes I get things in my proxied results that don't turn up in my unproxied (and vice-versa).

It came up for me in the adwords section, either at the top or on the right, for the first two pages. But I scrolled through five pages of results and in never came up as an "organic" result.

I wonder if this is the result of Google trying to deduplicate results that both show up organically and in Adwords.

If this site used to rank well for things like "photo pillows", it's not because it was the best site to show users, but rather, it was because the site was being propped up by self made backlinks. Here are some of the links that are all anchored with the word "photo pillows":

http://www.bobmarketing.com/links/page_Business_Marketing_17...

http://stardir.info/stardir/subcategory.asp?IDsubcate=494&of...

http://www.cyberpathway.com/cgi-bin/recip/internet/recip.cgi

The majority of the backlink profile is made up of self made low quality directory links.

It's possible that the Penguin algorithm has realized this and as a result is not trusting links to the site. But, it's also possible that Google has just gotten better at not counting this type of link when it comes to ranking. It's also possible that the site is under a manual penalty (which would be evident by looking at the Webmaster Tools manual spam action tool.)

When I look at the site's keyword positions on semrush.com, it appears that the rankings started a gradual decline as of May 2013. There was a Penguin refresh on May 23, so this is certainly a possibility. If the site is affected by Penguin, then in order to make the algorithm trust the site again, she's going to have to disavow each of the links that are self made. If there are good, truly natural links in the profile then she stands a chance of ranking well again. But, the likelihood is that the site won't get back to the previous rankings by just clearing up the backlinks because those rankings were not deserved in the first place.

It's not Google's fault that this site is not ranking well now. But, one could argue that it was Google's heavy reliance on links and on a system that could be scammed that allowed this site to reign for the time that it did.

Maintaining rank and attracting organic traffic from Google requires constant, continuous work, and there are plenty of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. We all compete for this traffic; getting angry at Google and writing a pissed-off blog post won't change her ranking - stepping up to the plate and competing for the traffic using white-hat SEO, semantic markup, webmaster tools, syndication through social media, etc. is the only way forward. SEO has changed - adapt or die.

Let's make people rank, so they could build businesses from traffic we drive, and then cut the traffic. That would be a good business plan for Adwords, no?

Now, seriously, I don't think this is Google plan. I think Google just got many billions websites and pages to rank. Google aim is not to be fair for every website, but instead to give the best results.

Given a huge number of websites (and people running them), these occurrences would obviously happen.

Yes, there is a serious conflict of interest at the heart of Google's business - they are in the business of selling links to advertisers, and of curating links for readers.

This is what I see on Google: https://i.cloudup.com/7ymLpPBmma-3000x3000.png

The first organic results don't even show up with the size of my window.

The whole situation these days on the SERP for any purchasable item is pretty sad. Luckily, I don't use Google that much when pricing or shopping. Results for data are much more helpful and useful for me.

And the shading is so much more hidden now. I had to tilt my screen properly to even see that it was ads.

I found out that this varies quite a bit based on your monitor. For example, on my newer Thinkpad, the yellow background really stands out. But on my desktop monitor (a 5 - 6 year old Samsung), it isn't noticeable at all, even with tilting the monitor.

You might want to color calibrate.

I've had this sort of thing happen myself, client's who's websites lose out on <company name> to some spammy site for no obvious reason. People seem to assume that google operates as some sort of public service which provides free services to website owners.

Now I just tell people to factor adwords spend into the development costs for a site.

Most misleading title of the day!

Google just plain hates exact match now in my experience. You have to build up solid reputation to get out of the exact match sort of penalty. I think they think exact match is generally spammy and elevates the spam filter. Some other factors in an algo update probably got more weight that the site was affected by and pushed the site over the edge. I tend not to change anything right away when this happens. Wait a bit and see if it corrects. Then make small iterative SEO changes and throw some youtube videos on your site that you produced. Another good strategy, and I've seen a bunch, is to change the domain name. Only do that in last resort. Watch how often googlebot accesses your site and try to increase frequency too.

Just don't trust your business to a "site". If it is your business, then your "site" should include a blog that should have regular articles about all sorts of related things, including about other related sites who hopefully have their own blogs and will write about your site. There needs to be a buzz of activity around your business or people will stop coming in the door.

Dirty windows? Spider webs in the doorframe? Trash on the sidewalk? Paint fading? Lightbulb burned out? Sign peeling? These are signs that the business is dying and the passersby will gladly help you out by not shopping there and by telling their friends to avoid the place.

Life is like that in the real world; why should the Internet be any different?

Mr. Cringely might start helping his sister by removing the completely unrelated link to his sister's site from his own, or at least mark it "nofollow".

It's really interesting reading the rantings of the grossly misinformed, especially when they are able to dismiss the entire industry of search engine optimization as "bullshit". I bet if the tone of his article was different, he would have dozens of SEOs willing to diagnose the problem and giving tips on how to fix the issues. Oh well, maybe he should get in tighter with Eric Schmidt, so he can personally take a look at the writer's wife's photo pillow website.

The entitlement is so rich.

Since work's got me locked into IE/Bing, I might as well point out that Ms. Cringely's site is #2 on Bing (#6 if you count the 4 ads on what looks like a 15% blue-gray background that come before #1).

If you're going to write an article criticizing how Google lowered your spot in the SERP, then at least try to make a substantive argument for why it deserves to be higher. Otherwise it's just whining.

"This is how she makes her living, selling on the web and through photo stores."

"She founded PC Data, the largest PC market research firm, now part of the NPD Group."

She founded the largest PC market research firm and now she has to make a living making quilts? How did that happen? Wouldn't the bigger story be how she lost all her money (which I'm assuming) running a PC market research firm?

She has to make her living != She makes her living. Maybe she just likes making photo quilts and found a niche market that allowed for a sustainable business that was now ruined. Isn't that what we'd all like to do: Earn enough money so that we can work in a job we like, even if that doesn't pay as much as we'd need to live?

Yes, but again, this would have made a interesting story. It's just confusing and strange to note such a thing and then not elaborate at least a bit on it. Also, someone who can found such a firm usually understands how not to "get mugged" by a changing search engine.

She has very few links and the ones she did have that were propping her up are dying out. She needs to work on the site more and reach out to other people more.

If I were running a business providing free advertising for such companies, I'd wait until a company relied on me and then make them pay for it. Given that google is a business, doesn't seem that odd that this happens. In fact, seems surprising if it doesn't.

The problem is your sister is in direct competition with Google. Searching Portrait Quilts brings up your sisters site then a large box that says "Shop for portrait quilts on Google"

Google is a competitive enterprise. They have to report to stock holders every quarter that income is more then the previous quarter.

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