So all the Egypt problems last month have shown that when people get together for any cause, amazing things can happen. The reason is simple: people in numbers have a lot of power. Today I was reading about how J.C. Penny got penalized by Google because of their “dirty” practices in buying links. It is almost like Google is trying to send a message to everybody saying if you get involved in link schemes we will punish you.
Now, there is a problem with that approach. Google can indeed punish a lot of businesses but it can’t punish all of them. Google lives only because it actually can return relevant results. For example, today I tried to find the samsonite luggage page in JCPenny and it’s nowhere to be found -> because of the penalty.
Now what would happen if a big group of the Fortune 500 companies decided to get together and all of them do whatever they want with SEO instead of listening to Google guidelines? You guessed it right. Egypt’s case. Google wouldn’t be able to enforce its guidelines without loosing what it is.
The biggest problem is that this is happening already. So many big companies are bending the Google guidelines that it is impossible for Google to target all of them, or any of them for that matter. Simply impossible. So are we getting ready to see an incredible decline in the capacity of search engines to provide valuable results? Yes.
The problem is that Search Engines are destined to fail because they can be manipulated. The more people manipulate the algorithms the more it becomes useless as a search engine. If it is useless, then people (searchers) won’t use it to find their information, and therefore they will turn to other alternatives. Then, companies won’t be interested so much in manipulating the algorithm because they don’t get a good return from doing it.
Google has a fundamental flaw (imho), they are so big that it seems like they own the Internet: but they don’t. Google is similar to a dictator ruler that decides to rein until he wants to. That may happen for many years, and people may sometimes be happy with the way they govern, and sometimes they will get upset, but surely they eventually will want change. When that change is so powerful in the community, they won’t stop until the dictatorship is ended.
No matter how bad or good the new government is, they just don’t care as long as the old government is gone.
In my opinion Google seems to be a pretty good government with some bad decisions sometimes, but overall good. However, I think that some problems with trying to play the card of “the user would think” and the “user would prefer if” sometimes gets in their way of saying: “we are Google and we want it a certain way and since we have much more power than you do, then we will do it the way we want it done.”
That is fair business. Google is huge and they have very good ideas and seriously the web wouldn’t be what it is today without them.
Long live the King!
