Google have lost the plot completely!

[akirk]

you do need to stop making assumptions...

I have business(es) employing real people in real premises - have raised large sums in investment & VC money - run a number of businesses in and outside the internet world from conceptual to advice based, R&D to product... not sure that I feel that they are / have been hated by government / banks / and investors - but then perhaps we have been in different market sectors

I am not sure that you are on the right forum if you really believe:

...The kind that actually made things and did useful things for economy. Precisely not the kind that sell things from a desk in an inernet office, all off whom are parasites on that real economy.

Sadly our society rewards the parasites more than the valuable people. Sure you can make far bigger margins selling stuff you never own sat at a desk. What does that prove? If the real businesses go out of business, internet businesses will have nothing to sell except redundancy advice...

The only businesses that are actually valuable are those who grow it, dig it out of the ground or make it, or take it to where it is needed. Everyone wants to "make a quick buck" off the back of these people. So I know a lot about real business. Not the pretend ones run from a desk...

Do you really believe this? How sad... So we should ditch the Samaritans / all education / all health care / all leisure industry / etc. according to your theory - they are not valuable because they don't grow it / dig it out of the ground / make it / take it where it is needed... - do you seriously want us to believe that is what you think?!

Are all internet based businesses really parasites on the real economy? I assume that you haven't actually studied economics?! So if my web business makes money from clients around the world (I have and have had clients in S. America / N. America / Africa / Russia / Australasia / Europe / UK) - that brings income into the country, is that beter or worse than my R&D / product company which sold only within the UK, but spent its money on development and manufacturing outside the UK... mmm...

For the very last time Alastair. I preach a marketing mix to build customer and prospect lists so businesses are not reliant on one source of traffic. So why you keep banging on about "single source is beyond" me.

because I keep on quoting you! your posts keep saying how dramatic Google changes will be to businesses - killing them left, right and center! - I keep pointing out that this is not true unless they are reliant on one source... you can't have it both ways! If you preach a marketing mix then the affect of a Google change is minimised so it really is not so big an issue... if it is as big an issue as you keep claiming then those businesses are not deploying such a mix... I am only pointing out the logic in your posts

?!

Alasdair

[mikeb]

Alastair - herewith the end of my responses

You seem intent on picking nits. Not interested

Nor am I interested in a willy waving competition. One of the tech mfring businesses I helped kickstart just a couple of years ago, just sold out to an US £5billion corporation, with a few nice share options maturing for me! So what???

The remarks you make on "valuable parts of the economy" are specious.
My remarks focussed on wealth generation. If you had noticed , samaritans and all of the other organisations you name are part of the wealth distribution of a caring society not the wealth generation

On wealth generation Primary vs secondary, and the profit levels in secondary and tertiary are excessive compared to prmary.
When Tesco makes more out of a farmer than the farmer does ,and the bankers and agents do better than all of them, is that what we really want? I don't!

Facts.
1/ The margins are lower , overhead levels are higher, the closer you get to primary industries.
When the economy catches a cold, these guys catch pneumonia.

2/ Businesses marketing is the sum of a number of parts.
If any part of their marketing is material , then losing it is material too.
Few businesses except the parasites can survive a substantial % drop in turnover, when there margins were only a couple of % to start with.

3/ I retired from that kind of businessa few years ago. I now do marketing from a desk. which was my forte. I don't delude myself into believing it is an essential part of the economy, and because it is high margin low overhead, a lot of my niche sites can crash and it would not make the slightest difference to my standard of living, most of them long since paid off the cost to create, so who cares?. My overheads are nothing. So I can survive a total meltdown.

Not so for some of the people in the real economy. 10% loss of revenue to them is a killer...

We - most of us on this forum - are very fortunate in that regard.
Margins are neither here nor there for most of us, except a few more £ in the bank.
We should not pretend it is because we are clever, it is because we have opted out!!

Anyway alistair - This is getting too acrimonious, so I am off somewhere else for a while. I really don't want an argument.

But When I tell you as a direct consequence of their "spam update" my spam site play things with many autogenerated pages and nuked links ( I only used to test ideas) are doing better than ever, you can safelly assume it is true. One of them up a factor of 3 on earnings!!!

So googles "utopia" is flawed, and so is the spin they put on it.
I take everything I hear with a pinch of salt. I ask myself two questions not one.
Not just what they are saying...but "why are they saying it" which is often less obvious but more revealing

I am out...

[JJMcClure]

Anyway alistair - This is getting too acrimonious, so I am off somewhere else for a while. I really don't want an argument.

You could avoid one if you had evidence to support your position rather than rhetoric. We enjoy a good debate on EP but you've been long on opinion and short on evidence. I'm still waiting for answers to my questions and evidence to support the assertions you've made and if you can provide it you have a good chance of changing my mind, until then I'll continue to believe that MC is a goldmine of SEO info and not deliberately misleading us as you believe.

[akirk]

Mike,

I am sorry that you see debate as argument - that implies an fixed position being opposed - which is not debate

The points I am making are I think simple and logical...
- Google is not the be all and end all of life on the internet - it is for many, but they need to get their heads around the fact that life online is as much a business as life offline
- Google have vast amounts more information than any one site owner, or small group of site owners - therefore their changes will be in the context of what they know - perhaps they have got it right for them?!
- Folks on here are likely to have a very skewed perspective on what they want from Google - and that is not likely to be a match for Google's desires...

so - no big issues for me...

Alasdair

[mikeb]

You could avoid one if you had evidence to support your position rather than rhetoric. We enjoy a good debate on EP but you've been long on opinion and short on evidence. I'm still waiting for answers to my questions and evidence to support the assertions you've made and if you can provide it you have a good chance of changing my mind, until then I'll continue to believe that MC is a goldmine of SEO info and not deliberately misleading us as you believe.

We will simply have to call it quits. Your definition and mine of misleading are probably different. Mine is the practical one.

In the narrow definition of "saying it is red, when it is provably blue" there are no examples, but then that is not what I said..

In the wider definition of misleading is: silence, commission, ommission, deviation, playing with words, all sorts. It is misleading, if it misleads and you fail to clarify.

"not saying anything, when the world says that something is red, when it is blue or has changed to blue"

"saying something is red, which whilst true, is not the answer to the question asked" in the hope nobody notices the subtle diffence i between what the question answered and the one asked, when the answer to the one asked is "blue"

"saying we reward red, when in reality red in itself is not rewarded but something that has correlation with it"

Silence.Commission. Omission. Deviation.
Even if all that you say is literally true, they are all misleading if they mislead

On the page rank sculpting debate, when they changed the algo on link juice , cutts said " the were surprised nobody noticed , so they said nothing", despite the fact that the discussion was raging all around.. That is deliberately misleading by silence.

In that case, presumably in the hope that agressive SEOs would waste time on the wrong things. Misleading with a cause.

As my mind game showed in a previous post. If wiki mattered , would they say so or not? or would they use as many half answers consistent with truth to deny it? Clearly the second or all the worlds spammers would descend on WIKI and destroy the authority. Google can be entirely consistent with statements on "no follow" , never follow them, but still count them!

To preserve the authority of what they regard as actual authority, they have to mislead or spammers would destroy the authority. . If I owned google I would have to do that too. It is so black and white, I cannot see why there is even a debate on that point. Google has to mislead, to preserve the very essence of what it thinks matters.

In short being "economical with the truth"

Google cannot measure quality, nor is even prescriptive about what it is.

Go read "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" - it drove someone mad trying to work out what quality was at a philosophical level. Quality is a definition. Whatever you want it to mean. If you want someone to use your definition you have to tell them...and not in hyperbole. The problem is the catch22 if you tell what you measure (which is the only real definition of quality) someone will game it. So back to square one. They want to encourage rightly a web full of enaging relevant unique content . But the reality is behind that and different. The reality is an algorithm

Do you play the rhetoric, or the algorithm? An interesting question. I know whcih is likely to earn more!

I take all that they say with a pinch of salt and ask "why are they saying it" - often less obvious, but more revealing.

We will have to disagree - time to wind it up.

[earnieboyd]

I was waiting for Bing to get mentioned, the only source I've seen that I trust has actually said that Bing isn't doing that great either and no one else in this thread has been quick to mention how much better Bing is, I wonder why not?

Personally I've been using a service that gives me a combined view from various search engines; I've made it my default search engine. It also gives me information that states this article was found on which site, including multiple hits. So I get "Found on Google" or "Found on Google, Yahoo! Search", etc. I am stating this to point out that Google isn't the all and mighty it once was. People are starting to find better ways to do research online and avoiding using Google alone for their information. As others have mentioned and I'll paraphrase, depending solely on Google to bring you business is going to bite you in the pocketbook eventually. So from what I've read thus far, I see that doing SEO is good but don't try to rank up unnaturally or you will be driven into the darkness of the bottomless pit out of site from your potential customers. It seems to me, and rightly so, Google is sending out its Penguins and Pandas to annoy those who think they can trick up the site in rank. Sure, there might be a miss in the new algorithms but they will fix anything broken in it eventually. The one thing I know is I am glad to not be on the IT team rolling out those updates. What a nightmare that must be.

[JJMcClure]

We will simply have to call it quits. Your definition and mine of misleading are probably different. Mine is the practical one.

From your perspective I'm sure that's true. From mine, you are missing out on very relevant and useful information by not believing MC, or maybe a better way to put it than 'believing' would be, by not being able to read between the lines and figure out what Google really want and why he's been allowed to say whatever it is.

An example, MC says 'is it really useful for your visitors if you have 15 domains all pointing at the same site?'. Translation = don't have 15 domains pointing at the same site, we don't like it. Thank you very much Mr MC, I didn't know that could hurt me, now I do.

Also, a number of things you've said about SEO have made it sound like you don't actually do any, do you?

Personally I've been using a service that gives me a combined view from various search engines; I've made it my default search engine. It also gives me information that states this article was found on which site, including multiple hits. So I get "Found on Google" or "Found on Google, Yahoo! Search", etc. I am stating this to point out that Google isn't the all and mighty it once was. People are starting to find better ways to do research online and avoiding using Google alone for their information. As others have mentioned and I'll paraphrase, depending solely on Google to bring you business is going to bite you in the pocketbook eventually. So from what I've read thus far, I see that doing SEO is good but don't try to rank up unnaturally or you will be driven into the darkness of the bottomless pit out of site from your potential customers. It seems to me, and rightly so, Google is sending out its Penguins and Pandas to annoy those who think they can trick up the site in rank. Sure, there might be a miss in the new algorithms but they will fix anything broken in it eventually. The one thing I know is I am glad to not be on the IT team rolling out those updates. What a nightmare that must be.

Yeah, exactly.

What's the service?

[Clinton]

I was waiting for Bing to get mentioned, the only source I've seen that I trust has actually said that Bing isn't doing that great either and no one else in this thread has been quick to mention how much better Bing is, I wonder why not?

I'm glad you asked.

Bing is outgoogling Google!

[mikeb]

From your perspective I'm sure that's true. From mine, you are missing out on very relevant and useful information by not believing MC, or maybe a better way to put it than 'believing' would be, by not being able to read between the lines and figure out what Google really want and why he's been allowed to say whatever it is.

An example, MC says 'is it really useful for your visitors if you have 15 domains all pointing at the same site?'. Translation = don't have 15 domains pointing at the same site, we don't like it. Thank you very much Mr MC, I didn't know that could hurt me, now I do.

Also, a number of things you've said about SEO have made it sound like you don't actually do any, do you?

Since google do have 15 domains pointed at one, and he uses the specific example of misspellings as why you would want to, you picked a bad example - I suggest you read the detail

All my observations come from a) listening intently to what he does and does not say,and
B) having many high ranking sites which allows me to observe the difference between the myth and reality of what google says.

I have to question the same in reverse - you seem to have bought into the dream, not reality.

[earnieboyd]

Yeah, exactly.

What's the service?

Should I mention it here? search<dot>pch<dot>com It searches yahoo, bing and google and enters my name in a contest drawing for a possible monetary prize just for doing a search. I'm not betting that it will net me anything but hey my grandmother once one a trip from pch.