Dear Rupert
googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com
googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com
> willing to exploit [its] dominant market position to stifle competition
Google has, on multiple occasions, utilised its search engine to prop up or otherwise give an advantage to its own products over that of third parties. The most obvious example is Google+, however YouTube is also a prime example (the change to video search is fairly recent), as is Google Maps (which effectively wiped out the sometimes superior competition at the time), and Gmail (which was heavily advertised on Google.com).
While Google doesn't, as far as I know, "fix" search rankings to give themselves an edge they do sprinkle adverts for their products before search results (e.g. YouTube, Google Maps) or around the perimeter of the page (e.g. Google+, Gmail).
That all being said however: I'd take what Google does over what News Corp does any day of the week. Google might be a little corrupt, but News Corp is the poster child for abuse of position. Plus News Corp's lobbying has screwed up more than just their own specific market segment, it has had lasting effects on countries (and helped put innocent people in jail, literally).
At the end of the day as the internet stands in 2014, you have a great deal of choice. If you're tired of Google's shenanigans then hop over to DDG, Bing, or even Yahoo!
They certainly have done that in the past. Marissa Mayer admitted it in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT1UFZSbcxE#t=44m50s
>When we rolled out Google Finance, we did put the Google link first. It seems only fair, right? We do all the work for the search page and all these other things, so we do put it first. That’s actually been a policy, then, because of Finance we implemented it in other places. So for Google Maps, again, it’s the first link.
It is very ironic that News Corp is the one accusing Google of abusing its position. News Corp not only is the poster child for abuse of its position...it has had actively criminal subsidiaries. Its agents have allegedly engaged in illegal activity for 15+ years (some of which they have definitely been caught on). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hackin...
If you are wondering why they are a problem, you might read "The Jungle", or any history of the era of the big industrial trusts. Or you could read "When Wizards Stay Up Late", a history of the Internet's invention. AT&T, the communications monopoly at the time, was a big barrier to the development and growth of the Internet. And, from their perspective, rightly so: they made a zillion dollars from charging for voice calls, something everybody now expects to be free.
In any case, AT&T was a legal monopoly, not a market player with less than 70% of market share like Google (according to comScore). The lessons are not necessarily directly applicable.
Same reason why it was wrong for Microsoft to put Internet Explorer and later Windows Media Player in Windows: It is anti-competitive for a monopoly to utilise its market position to gain an edge into other market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compe...
> further advance their products would be ignorant
I think you meant "foolish." The word "Ignorant" doesn't work in that context.
Ignorant:
1) lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated 2) lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about something in particular
More "foolish" or "misguided" in that context.
With the notable exception of Google+ (which has now been relaxed), signing up for one google service did not force you into any other google service or product. You can access any google property on IE or other browsers. There is no anti-competitive compulsion in the way that Microsoft forces IE upon windows customers.
Not in search rankings it hasn't. There is zero, zilch, nada, nothing wrong with google.com showing ads for other google stuff but not 3rd parties, same with the spaces around the search results.
And your "obvious" example is anything but. Google+ does not rank highly, and afaik never has. A search for "Wil Wheaton" turns up lots of results including his twitter and tumblr profile, but his G+ profile (which is fairly active) is no where to be seen on the entire first page.
Google Finance does not rank higher than Yahoo Finance in your example. The stock onebox that appears (which, you'll note, Bing also does) has a list of links to Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, and MSN Money. Bing only links to MSN Money fwiw, so Google is "more fair" than the competition here anyway.
And if you do a search for what's obviously a stock ticker, like AAPL, you'll actually see Google goes "Onebox with answer + links to google finance, yahoo, and MSN money followed by finance.yahoo.com search result", whereas Bing is "MSN money onebox followed by a link to google finance"
So clearly Google Finance's high position is justified regardless, as other search engines put that result first.
It was also wonderfully mean to ignore the News Corp CEO who signed the letter and reply to Rupert instead, implying quite a lot about the role of the current CEO.
> Undermining the basic business model of professional content creators will lead to a less informed, more vexatious level of dialogue in our society
Newspeak indeed.
But as a small business owner under a rather crushing Google link penalty since 2011 I thought I offer my perspective.
First, it's important to note my penalty was absolutely not of my creation — I never bought, sold or traded links, and followed Google Web Master guidelines to the letter.
Unfortunately loads of spammy links I never created came home to roost in 2011 and I've been penalized ever since.
I've done my best to clean up but so far no relief has come.
So that out of the way my points:
1. People are certainly free to choose a different search engine and yes, plenty of alternatives exist. The problem is we don't appear to be using them anymore.
Although I'm just one example, last month's traffic numbers are quite telling:
328 hits from Google, 2 from Yahoo, and 1 immediate bounce from Bing.
Of the 328 Google hits, only 10 were for keyword searches. The rest we all for direct variants of my company name (rack forms, rack forms, and rack form).
The kicker: On Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo I'm page two or higher for keyword searches, on Google page 15 or lower.
Please let that sink in for a moment: despite being buried 15 pages deep in Google, I still got more keyword hits from them than I did from being a top result in three other search engines combined!
It was not like this just a few years years ago and it's frankly quite concerning.
Here's the rub: If you're a Google user, which over 98% of my potential users appear to be, because of my penalty you'll simply never know I exist, and if you're in the market for kick ass web form software that kinda stinks for you. I have a fantastic product!
Despite this living hell of a penalty I still believe in Google, and absolutely believe they mean well. I just really, really hope they can figure out a way to prevent spam without getting guys like me caught up in the middle of the fray.
For my business Google's market share is no longer academic, it's a tough reality that's becoming very difficult to ignore.
Does this mean that users were posting spammy links on your site, that spammy links elsewhere pointed to your site or something else?
And I do mean spammy, as in pure spam. Almost all came from foreign language sites, and would be in the form of mysite.com as the link and Louis Vuitton|Fancy Watch Brand|Viagra|Etc as the display text. At no point was my site ever compromised.
The kicker is it's unknown if these links were actually helping my site at some point, and the penalty was simply a reflection of the links being devalued.
@vdaniuk - Totally with ya, but I've actually done that already. In fact, a 301 actually transferred the penalty from the old site to new back in 2012!
I'm literally the worst SEO ever, but in my defense I used a 301 to create a smooth transition for my existing users (which number in the thousands). I had no idea that a 301 would be used against me like that.
I guess from my point of view then, the objections to changing brand/identity are:
a. My brand is something I work hard on, and changing it is confusing for my users, and difficult and time-consuming from a business standpoint (SSL, taxes, etc). What's more...
b. My deepest apologies if I'm wrong on this, but I've heard that even if I do change brands, Google has actually made it clear they may follow webmasters who've been penalized, not just the domains they ran.
Now it potentially becomes this bizarre cloak and dagger world of hiding from Google, something I'm simply not comfortable with. I'm proud of my past.
c. There's been, and I hate that I know this stuff but I do follow the topic closely now, but I've heard that new web site remain in something called the sandbox for much longer now. God I hate that I even said that as I deplore SEO stuff, but starting a new site simply is no guarantee that rank will be restored. Not to mention the aforementioned costs of setting up a storefront, building the site, possibly being targeted for a new penalty for who I am, and so on.
But yes, at some point it may very well come down to starting a new site...again.
I am not so sure that you are under a link-based penalty. I know you did not ask for this, but I had a look at your website's link profile, source and index health.
1. SEO: The online web form market is hugely saturated. You probably can not compete with Wufoo on terms like "web form builder". Honestly ask yourself if you currently deserve a top 10 spot for this term. Are you a top 10 player in this field? Explore more specific and longtail keywords. Create better targeted pages and page titles. "Documentation - NicSoft Software" is a missed chance. Create more content on the blog (inbound marketing).
2. Links. You do not have enough natural links to beat competitors. They get linked from webdeveloper forums by real users of the software. You also should check out Google's stance on "Powered by"-links. If this turns in the majority of your backlinking profile, you get links from a lot of bad neighborhoods. These links may thus do more harm than good. It is not an editorial link, but probably in exchange for a free version of the product. Much safer to nofollow links created for profit or SEO/online marketing purposes.
3. Site HTML is not well-structured for information retrieval. For every page on your site, the first heading is "Home". Browse your site with styles disabled. Reorder repeating boilerplate code below the relevant page content. Specify a canonical or make sure only one version is served to visitors with redirects (both www- and non-www versions of the site return duplicate content).
4. Index health is poor. Robots.txt file is indexed. There are a few inactive subdomains, an unattended Wordpress and Drupal install in a subdirectory. Includes are indexed as separate pages "/inc/footer.php". Documentation (the content "meat" if the site) is off limits for bots. Over 90% of pages on the site are in the secondary index, which is not a good sign.
About 10 hits a day from Google is far too low for any commercial site to survive on. You could get more than 10 hits on a random wordlist.
Do not solely think about in-links. Are you even linking to reputable sources yourself? End-node sites are far less interesting for visitors than hub sites.
That said, a few thoughts:
1. The link based penalty stems from the fact the traffic drops correlate exactly with Penguin release dates. Also, the "official" volunteers and other good folks over at the Google Webmaster forms came to the same conclusion. Before those exact dates I had ranked on page 1 for "php web form software", and page 1 or 2 for "web form software", since mid-2008.
To that end, you're 100% correct the market is tough, but we're a very specialized form builder, made especially for developers.
As far as deserving Page 1 - Google used to think so for several years, as my product is pretty darn great if you need flexible form software. We have four versions, two of which are free, covering both self-hosted and SaaS models. No one even comes close to offering such a wide variety of solutions.
In short, if you need form software and you find my site you're guaranteed not to be disappointed. If nothing else you're able to choose between two pretty awesome free versions, something no one else offers. I'm also ecstatic to answer questions and help users out, even if they don't buy or use my software. I would think this would be of high value to Google -- and it certainly used to be before the penalty.
As far as the site recommendations: I'm taking these to heart for sure, though I have to say, the previously mentioned Google Webmaster forums -- the current site is a direct result of working with them for over 3 months, making the exact same types of changes and improvements. Nothing, and I mean nothing, worked.
I didn't know at the time, but it was recently stated by John Mueller from Google that a Penguin recovery is simply not possible until they refresh and release a new version of the Penguin algorithm.
So at the end of the day, sadly, (and please do not take this as dismissive as you bet I'll be making changes): my problem is not content or structure, it's that darn link penalty.
All the while, and again, I'm not sure who this benefits.
However, I'm not sure that anchoring yourself to "they used to think I was good enough" is a valid argument. Perhaps they were presenting bad results that benefitted you before, and have fixed that with better results now.
It honestly sounds like you're mostly upset because something was taken from you that you were used to having. That does not necessarily mean you deserved it previously.
My defense of the current site from a content perspective is simple: just go to it (www.rackforms.com).
I feel very strongly the look (clean professional), layout (easy to navigate), and technical details (fast, fully responsive, etc) are not causing it to be penalized from a content perspective.
My reasoning for why it should rank is also simple: it used to rank high, and none of that was an accident. I've always followed common sense methodology when creating it, such as creating content for humans, not search bots.
Never the less, since the penalty I've happily made dozens of changes, most of which were suggestions from kind and well meaning SEO folks -- none of them made a difference. Not a single one.
Conclusion -- my issue isn't nor has it ever been content, it's links.
Of course the irony is the vast majority of changes I made were to please search engine bots, not humans. Google has always said this is the opposite of what we should be doing.
For example, one guy suggested I used to word 'form' too much on my home page, and Google may consider this keyword stuffing. And so I pruned it from 23 to 12. Trouble is I sell web form software, and let's just say changes I made were, in many cases, a stretch -- many sounded decisively nonhuman. Who and what am I helping at that point? Google bot is clearly smarter than that. The kicker: the current page 1 site used the word 'form' 43 times. It's just silly voo-doo at this point, and no one except Google knows what the hell they're talking about.
Here's why this is all a bit scary: as link-penalized webmasters poke around the edges and make such changes, we're getting further away from a site that used to be looked upon favorably by Google from a content perspective.
The reason I cite "it used to be good enough" is common sense. Yes we can always improve our site and we should be: but a link penalty, mine especially, is so thorough and so unrecoverable so far, that making loads of other changes will very likely hurt more than help.
But again, just visit my site, visit the page 1 and 2's, and then consider I'm page 15 or lower. I have no doubt my site, should it's ranking be restored, would be a delight for Google users to visit.
Yesterday was just another example of that. I'd qualify which yesterday, but it really applies to all of them.
So, like Sky Broadband in the UK, then?
I suspect that their interactions with the EC regulator [1] are rather more detailed.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_for_Competi...
As for the Android Google Play lockin allegations, what more is there for Google to say? Android is open source and usable by anyone, this is simple fact. Google even calls out Amazon and Nokia doing exactly this. There literally does not exist a certification process for Android-related products. There exists a certification process if you want GOOGLE PLAY, but not if you just want Android.
Also, i don't understand why you felt the need to emphasize Google Play. That is exactly what i had said in my comment above.
That's a joke, right?
> links to the Google Play certification requirements would be useful substantiation
Irrelevant. You should re-read News Corps' claims, which is what Google is responding to. Google Play certification was not a complaint. Android certification was the complaint - and you can't link to something that doesn't exist.
> That's a joke, right?
Absolutely not. Why should it? There is no need to lay bare the entire thing, but a change log has no reason to be hidden.
> You should re-read News Corps' claims
I did, and while they do not say "Google Play" outright (since it involves actually MORE things than Google Play), they very clearly state that they are talking about things other than the core OS package:
Google has developed a "certification"
process for *Android-related products*