Google's Attack on the American Economy

Christianguitar.org, sells Christian guitar tabs. The company claims to serve 180,000 guitarists and musicians and claims to have been highly ranked in Google's search engine for years. It has, however, recently seen a drop in pageviews from Google by 20 to 90%. Dollardays.com, which claims to be an e-commerce site that distributes 50,000 products to general shoppers, small businesses, and non-profits, and claims to be a BBB business, also claims to have seen an unprecedented decline in readership. Parentingscience.com, which claims to have PhD written and researched articles and parenting and child development claims to have had a 25% drop in readership. Internet retailer kitchensource.com claims to have articles written in house and also claims to have lost 30 to 40% of its readership coming from Google. One could go on and on, but these are only a few of the businesses hurt by Google's recent attack on the American economy when it made a change to its search ranking algorithms. The result has been a lot of small American businesses, like the ones listed above, as well as writers on Associated Content and other sites have seen a huge drop in readership.

Google, naturally, claims on its website, google.com/support/fourum to have the highest motives in making the changes it has. Supposedly, according to Google's metrics, "this update improves overall search quality." Supposedly, the company is concerned about high quality sites which may have been affected, and it has offered the forum for people to make comments. The forum also listed the comments by representatives of the websites mentioned above, as well as countless others.

On the Google blog, googleblogspot.com, the company claims to only want readers to be able to find the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. The company claims there is a lot of content online, both good and bad. It also claims its change only affects 11.8% of all searches. It also states its change will cause some sites to have more readers, while some will have less. It also states it wants to reward high quality websites.

If it really wants to reward high quality websites, let's just assume only some of the small businesses complaining in the forum provided by the company are giving honest facts. Those businesses claim to have original content, so why have they lost so many readers? How are high quality sites and businesses not being hurt? Assume that many of the representatives of these are telling the truth, how many business representatives have not even bothered commenting to Google, because they think the mighty company will not listen anyway?

No honest person would say that Google might have not had any legitimate reasons for making some adjustments to its algorithms. As an article on money.cnn.com claims, some companies, such as JC Penney and overstock.com allegedly set up fake websites that linked to their real websites, causing Google's algorithms to ensure the companies' websites ranked higher.

Even though these things may be true, however, the story quoted business leaders who tell Google the search engine is killing their business. One person said he lost 40% of his traffic from Google. Maybe Google has overreacted to some legitimate issues.

In other words, if you are a writer for Associated Content and have seen your pageviews go down by 40 to 60%, don't be shocked. Expect a lot lower performance payment in April of 2011 than you received in March. In fact there are many articles online about how Google was specifically attacking what it deems to be low quality content on "content farm" websites such as Associated Content and others. Google, however, never has specifically mentioned the websites by name.

Let's just look at some of the writers featured on Associated Content. The current home page mentions George Rupp, the President of the International Rescue Committee, Steve McKee, a businessweek.com columnist, and Susan Baroncini-Moe, the CEO of Business in Blue Jeans. She is also a marketing and small business expert. As far as financial writers, one writer is money coach Bill Stanley, who is a financial advisor on Fox 21 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Sheryl Young, who writes on numerous topics, but especially faith-based articles, news stories, and political articles, has written for the "Tampa Tribune," "Chicken Soup for the Soul," and has won an Amy Foundation National Writing Award. Those sound like some quality writers to me, Google.

If you have found your pageviews have declined dramatically on Associated Content, now you know why. You're probably wasting your time commenting to Google, because the company is so big it can do whatever it pleases--including attacking the American economy. Nevertheless, I left my comments at the forum.

Citations:

Think you're affected by the recent algorithm change? Post here. Wysz, Google employee, google.com/support/forum

Finding More High Quality Sites in Search, no author listed, googleblog.blogspot.com

"Websites to Google: 'You're killing our business!' by David Goldman, money.cnn.com

Associated Content from Yahoo , associatedcontent.com