Corporate Sites Deserve to Rank #1 (Brand Ad Dollars)

Heh, the Manics in an SEOBook post, I like it! :)

Great clarity as usual Aaron. It's only our closeness to this particular industry that makes it apparent, but as you point out, this has been going on in all lines of business since corporations began to spring up in place of small localised businesses.

If our rip off socialist government had spent even one fourth of the trillions wasted on the "economic stimulus" making loans to small businesses the economic crisis would have been over long ago. Gov. supported only big business while they wallow in the pig trough of excessive benefits across every department. I hope some people will go out of their way to find and do business with small companies. Even if it costs a little more, you are getting more value. It is up to people to change this. If enough spend at small companies the Corporations will be affected.

When a consumer or small business owner gets caught (acting like a big business, and) doing something illegal they go to jail. When a big business repeatedly commits serious crimes the wost thing that could possibly happen is a shake up of management.

That sums it up Aaron.

Aaron,

Where do you think Google's trend of favoring large, established websites in search - even when those websites are aggregating others' original content - is taking the internet?

A common thread in your blog posts these days seems to be the notion that Google is mistreating site owners, web searchers, and just about anybody on the planet with and possibly without an internet connection. But what do you see coming out of that mistreatment?

Thanks for the bountiful reply.

"My general view ... is that due to an increasing flow of information people will become more distrusting toward government & many large authorities. This in turn (combined with cheaper computing, free software, and cheaper communications) will lead many more people to be parts of smaller niche communities built around their interests."

As somebody who has approached the internet first and foremost as a tool for learning, I have always been aware of some of the problems behind the "increasing flow of information." With the rise of scrapers and aggregators, as well as content farms, finding good information amongst the bad has become more difficult.

It seems like Google (or would "Search Engines" be more accurate?) is/are driving the creation of an internet of slums, of masses of low quality, highly duplicate information that obscures the much smaller (though still sizable) neighborhoods of useful, original information.

When you say that more people are going to become parts of niche communities, are you suggesting that this will happen as a reaction to not being able to find what they need among all the crap? Or for some other reason entirely?

What do you think those communities might look like?

Right now, Facebook is opening their arms to all the marketers that Google has kicked out. Sure, there is a lot of crap out there but plenty of good businesses have been caught up in Google's "scorched earth" advertising policies.

Direct response advertising (that is, targeting consumers directly rather than using branding) is paramount for small business because the budgets required to brand are often astronomical.

I really see Google becoming totally corporate. Look how well that's worked out for mainstream media outlets...viewership, subscribers and revenue are way down. The average person (outside of the 20% who'll believe anything they are told) are no longer buying the corporate line on anything.

You can go out to the store, the doctor's office, really anywhere and I see so many people questioning everything from medications, food additives, the banks, the state and on and on. I think the age of big media is over for a large majority of the population; simultaneously, corporations are acting in more flagrantly criminal ways than ever before.

If Google wants to propup a dying corporate culture I think they will eventually go down with the ship.

"All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride legitimately, by the grace of God." Thomas Jefferson

Google corporate decisions are making to much damage to the company. If you examine Google as a corporation you will see that apart from the Search Engine and Android it has been a failure after failure. They have invested a lot of money into rebuilding (not innovate or create a new product) Facebook, twitter and Wikipedia. All three of them a failure as you can see Buzz, Orkut and Knol. The bad thing is that Google always says concentrate on your site and not others people site but they are fixated on other sites such as Facebook!

Android is an open software (which is good) but produce no income to the company! In the mean time they are bleeding money and trying to burn adword advertiser's money as fast a possible so they can meet profits. Who they are going to offer privilege positions on the SERP? Of course they will get Demand Media and Huffington Post since they profit from that traffic as well. That is why Matt Cutts said that they can draw a line and have the NY Times in one side, etc...What he was saying is that they can draw a line between those content farms that produce lots of money to them and rank them better. In the mean time Facebook is taking big steps into the Google market. They released their email and tons of sites are using the Like Button which they collect information from. Soon they will release a search engine with an algo based on likes and recommendations from users around a topic. This creates an advantage over the link based algo at Google. No wonder why Google is copying Facebook again with the +1. But again, they are behind the game. No innovation but stealing other people ideas!

The issue is getting worse as Google is getting crazy and try to competes with every company in the planet. Look at the most recent failure: Google Music. Trying to compete with Apple Store, the music industry said NO to Google. The people at the music industry are smart enough to know that if they give Google the information and power, Google will take control of it sooner than later. They were forced to open Google music as a service to upload music as a cloud. WHAT?? There are tons of better services that are not fragmented like Dropbox, etc... Again another failure from Google.

Other failure has been Google Books. Again you see how the company is lost in terms of guidance and focus. Trying to compete against Amazon has been a total failure. I do not know a single human that has purchase a book from their store. In the meant time Amazon is focus on its core business and innovating it with the kindle, kindle mobile apps, etc...

As long as Google keeps trying to copy and compete with all the big business in the planet and forgetting about why the are Google you will see a company in deterioration. Google does not has reinvent itself, Google has to go back to its main core business, to be that company everybody admired and loved. A company were webmasters deposited their trusts.

As always, great post and comments. I am interested to see the next Hitwise stats to see if there is further erosion of Google Market dominance. It is interesting that the same antitrust laws that led to the break up of Ma Bell (Telecom Reform Act of 1996) never led to any real scrutiny of Google's market dominance/near-monopoly in the search space. Maybe innovators like blekko (cool feature in new SEOBook Toolbar by the way!) and established players like Bing/Yahoo! will continue to chip away and maybe a 40/60 market may not be too far off assuming more of the same in terms of low quality SERPs.

I do think main stream people are noticing the degradation in the Google SERPs and over time, the search engine with the superior user experience will always gain market share and ultimately dominate. That's how Google built and maintained its dominance. In hurting the niche, specialty content providers by rewarding the thieves that plagiarize their content, Google not only hurts the publishers, but also hurts their users, and therefore themselves. Maybe Google, like many other huge corporations, are spread too thin causing them to loose site of their core competency - connecting users with quality content faster and better than any other search engine.

Call me naive, but quality content is what users crave and if Google can't get users to quality content quickly/efficiently, others will emerge to deliver the goods. I think the key takeaway for me at least is from an SEO perspective, small independent publishers investing in generating unique, quality, specialty content now need to focus more energy on cultivating organic non-Google traffic. This means that for more of us, the search engine traffic distribution will ultimately end up looking more like example in your post.

As far as Facebook investing in generating a smear campaign against Google on the basis of raising privacy concerns, I think that's definitely a great example of the pot calling the kettle black and Facebook should realize that corporations operating from glass buildings definitely should not throw stones!

Okay, so Facebook is sleazy, Google is sleazy. There are so many issues in just one post. How many times has Google had a face-off with their haters? I do have to agree that I did notice Google has been using a lot of its links to youtube, for instance. I didn't know it was sort of a "rip-off". Well, we will see who wins this battle between these two giants. I can't say who will win this one.

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