I’m not too sure about that.
Perhaps you don’t understand how Google work then. Google rely on their users and their users only come back because Google do something useful and what is that useful thing that Google do? They serve up OUR websites. So, the more Google help us provide good quality useful websites by providing lots of lovely free site improvement tools, the more their own users love Google and everyone is happy.
or we see what they do, in a different light??
Google rely on their users and their users only come back because Google do something useful and what is that useful thing that Google do? They serve up OUR websites.
Yes; but they do it in the way they choose - which has nothing to do with the value or quality of the site served up. It is detemrined only by their own algorithm which is very different from ‘customer choice’.
So, the more Google help us provide good quality useful websites by providing lots of lovely free site improvement tools, the more their own users love Google and everyone is happy.
I slightly disagree because it is a false sense of ‘happy’. Yes, no question; Google does indeed help with some site improvement tools. But that/those, have little to do with whether the user of google search, is happy with the results. Indeed, there is a human ‘thing’ in all this. (Can’t recall the term exactly but I shall use ‘frailty’, for now).
When people search and get reuslts, they are pleased because they have a perception that they “got what they asked for”. Indeed they have - in both meanings of that phrase. Not only has what they wanted, been returned somewhere in the gazillions of results (whether they can actually find them amongst them all), but, they also have the perception that what they want in in the top three pages so, they have what they see as being the finite detail of what they wanted. As we - living online - know, the reality is often different!
Many of us know of occasions, where we haven’t been able to find what we want and have used a site returned, as a resource in itself. IN some subject matters, if that site doesn’t have what we want - the perception again (on top of the first one), is often that ‘this is all there is’ and the user works with what information they got.
Now; my point in my previous post was this…
If google prevents the indexing of pages, where the content is very small because they say it must be spam; they will also stop returning results from some sites which act like phone books and provide merely a signpost to other places. Some of those sites charge for their links and with google’s reasons for removing spam cited as constructive, they are potentially hiding from us, the fact that they will actually kill the revenue flows to those companies which do help their clients.
In nutshell, it is perfectly conceivable that googles bean counters have decided that such sites are little more than leakage from googles own revenues streams and they should shut them down by making them invisible.
Google has already got in place a system of blacklisting spammy sites. They only need to enforce such ‘rules’ to all sites and if they did, the matter would be resolved - if it were only about spam. By embarking on this catch-all type of approach they invite (in my view justifiable), criticism from people who see it as a smoke-screen for what is actually a method of killing off such listings sites so that in the future, the only way to be found online - in google at least - is by paying google.
Now I hope I am wrong and that my cynicism has indeed got the better of me for now. But in the same vein; I think google has for some time been in a dilemma.
“How do we remain good for the Internet and at the same time, run a multi-billion dollar business” - a rhetorical question.
I doubt they can do both and, the more they pursue such a course: the more they dominate/begin to dictate - the sooner someone will come along with a replacement for google. Yes, some have tried before - I seem to recall ‘cuil’ or some such name - but it wasn’t sufficiently radically different.
Dominance got M$ into bother but there is a more important matter at stake here. M$ never controlled the income to individual small businesses but google does. And if they get it wrong, they could destroy economy’s across the globe.
That’s my concern.
bazz