Pissed off with Google

Google may normally present great search - but as a company they have often seemed very aloof and inconsiderate to webmaster concerns. In fact, Google has increasingly looked reclusive and inept at addressing the webmaster industry as a whole, and distinctly lacks the human touch.

Even GoogleGuy, the company’s human face in the webmaster community, behaves more like a PR (that’s Public Relations) machine, rather than someone acting outside of the company’s marketing remit.

The fuss about the Google AutoLink and Marissa Meyer’s defence of it show that Google’s interests are increasingly against the webmasters - I’m sure Bob Massa would have a field day commenting on how Google can extend the feature to be additionally parasitic upon the webmastering community through which it enriches itself.

And now look at its sorry situation. Google’s index is broken, yet the company keeps its broken product live, thinking that its dominant market position will carry it through fine. Sorry, Google - webmasters will remember that Google

Personally speaking, I’ve been in majority happy with Google thus far. But let’s look at the facts - here I am, posting on a blog on a website that currently can’t even rank for its own name on Google.

Also, this site has a hard job ranking for anything - even its own page titles. It is firmly sandboxed. I’ve bought links - for example, on www.small-business-forum.com I had a text link that said “Free Business and Marketing Resources”.

That’s not an attempt to linkbomb/Googlebomb. It’s written for human users. As are the ads on other sites that states “Business resources” and “Platinax Internet”.

As someone in SEO I know these links should have some impact on search - my Platinax homepage being associated with the keywords so that perhaps users searching for some combination of the keywords with my on-page elements might find the site, and then look to use its free resources.

A search on Google shows Platinax pretty much doesn’t exist for much anything on these lines.

I know Google wants us all to pretend that search engines don’t exist, other than to let them into our sites - but that’s not the real world. Search has become the essential way to order information on the web. It has become a major vector in web development.

So although I have no right to expect top rankings for highly competitive search phrases such as “business” and “internet”, I still expect use of anchor text pointing at my site containing those keywords to actually associate it for them - and even capture some Google search traffic for wild searches which involve that semantic association of “Platinax” with “internet” and “business” for various low-key low-traffic search terms.

Yet so far as I can tell, it doesn’t in the slightest. The links which help describe the site are not simply sandboxed - they appear to have never been attributed with describing this site.

Now that in itself would be bad…

…but what is additionally and excrutiatingly frustrating is that I created this site by dismantling 4 other domains and pointing them here via 404’s - sites that covered articles, forums, directory, and SEO, that I thought would work better as one single business resource site, rather than a satellite of niche interest sites.

Yet the domain the Platinax forums were originally on received *twice* as much traffic, when those forums were *twice* as small as the current forums now - even though the only single different was a 404 redirect from one to the other. Sure, search is dynamic, but I also recognise that prior rankings, especially based on anchor text, have been very much lost simply because I made the innocent move of redirecting traffic.

I feel kicked in the teeth by Google search because I dared open a new site on a new domain, and then advertise it outside of Google’s PPC program.

Overall it leaves me feeling punished as a form of “collatoral damage” by Google. And the fact that Google has such a cold-seeming way of addressing the webmastering community leaves the entire company feeling very unfriendly indeed.

Still, at least Google visits. Yahoo! doesn’t even know this place exists, though there are gawd knows how many links pointing to it. I’ve e-mailed an address supplied at SEW, but no reply so far. Still, at least Yahoo! has human faces. As a last ditch resort at least I can feel able to post to the Yahoo! blog or even Jeremy Zawodney to ask for a web address to raise the issue.

As Platinax already receives some Google traffic there’s hardly any complaint I can raise with GoogleGuy. And if I did approach him, presuming he had the time to address it after all the other whining complaints I’m sure he’s inundated with, I get the strong feeling that I’d face moral judgement as to whether I followed Google’s strict interpretation of their webmaster guidelines closely enough.

I don’t want condemnation, simply the ability to communicate - or be communicated with. Google has never commented on the Google Sandbox, nor has Google even admitted that there is anything wrong with the current update.

It’s issues like these that make Google see itself as very much “apart” of the internet, rather than “a part” of it. Which is so different from Yahoo!’s current approach.