Unless you’ve been stranded on a desert island recently; you will know doubt be aware that Google has again been ‘tinkering’ with their search algorithm.
This has seriously affected thousands of websites and in turn businesses worldwide; unfortunately rubbing salt in the wound to what what are already very difficult trading conditions for thousands of small business owners.
Whilst it is considered by Google that these changes will deliver search results from higher quality sites; such dramatic changes will no doubt be considered by many business owners as frankly unfair, too severe, and affecting innocent parties, just trying to get more traffic, more customers and more sales to survive!
Google claims that these changes are necessary to combat against the proliferation of poor search engine optimized content that’s dominated their rankings over the past few years. This has allowed many businesses in the process to capitalize and no doubt create huge profits by offering search engine position services to small business owners and marketeers.
Now many of these, such as buildmyrank.com are closing down and having to refund recent subscribers to their service in the process. Perhaps these companies have made enough money out of small business owners to retire and call it a day without worrying too much?! There is however no evidence of that and the fact that some companies are refunding is positive.
However, the problem remains that directly as a result of Google’s algorithm update, many people running small and medium sized businesses have seen significant falls in traffic against specific search keywords; in some reported cases by as much as 75%! This will no doubt ruin these business and cause closures if they do not recover their position quickly.
The chances are, that if you’ve used built a solid website, with unique and relevant content, plus have not tried to take shortcuts in SEO, such as buying links on traffic services sites, like buildmyrank.com; then you’ve probably not been affected by these changes at all. In fact you may now be achieving higher rankings for searches more directly relevant to your business.
But if you are one of the thousands of businesses that have used such services that has (until now) tricked Google into thinking that you are a leading player in your ‘niche’, then its pretty likely that you are currently feeling hurt by these changes and wondering what to do next in terms of your online business and web marketing options.
The big question now for those affected is whether to persist with Google, in the hope that they suddenly decide not to make some dramatic change to their algorithm; switch from organic to cost per click advertising (maybe that’s what Google want); or even ditch Google altogether and look at other more reliable sources of marketing that give you more control and where you can spread your marketing risk.
Over to you…what will you do?