Re: Google dance

From: Robert Day <rpday_at_btinternet.com>
Date: Mon 08 Dec 2003 08:22:01 -0600

"Robert Ross" <rross_at_AdventuresMarketing.com> wrote:

>... there is a huge problem with millions of affiliates, that
>cummulatively do nothing but get in the way of tryig to find an actual
>company's web site. Statistically, most of these do little business for
>any of their sponsors and they are just another form of spam. For
>Google, relevancy is the name of the game and they must be able to make
>the index more relevant, which means less spammers. They may try things
>that backfire, as the latest algorythm did when it knocked off honest
>players in the top two pages instead of spammers. That is unfortunately
>a price we all had to pay for a better Google down the road.

Is it for Google to decide whether someone running an affiliate program
should be thrown off their directory? If companies who run affiliate
programs feel that their affiliates are in the way of their own sites,
well - no one forced them into offering an affiliate program in the
first place, did they? If it's a problem for them, why not stop their
affiliate program. I have no problem in getting rid of spammers but
lots of people are confusing the term "spammer" with the educated
optimiser who has a relevant site and who is only interested in getting
that relevant site in front of people searching for their services.

>I can tell you, as a major AdWords buyer, that they do not intend to
>force everyone to use AdWords.

How do you know that?

>While that may sound like a neat idea to
>some folks, in reality it could destroy AdWords and kill the credibility
>of the general index, which they sell to other search engines and is an
>important profit center. Most importantly, doing that could creater even
>bigger bidding wars over keywords, forcing small advertisers out fo the
>game and killing ROI for all advertisers.

Why should the owners of Google worry about that? Their track record
over the last few weeks is one of killing off businesses without
compunction. The owners of Google will soon be mega rich people after
the flotation. They will shed their crocodile tears all the way to the
bank (to mix my metaphors).
Sure, they can do what they want, but let's not have them taking the
moral high ground with claims that what they are doing is fair. IMO they
will quickly become a much less popular search engine because they
may only be showing sites that people are prepared to pay to be listed.

>It is a tough balancing act to
>find the right mix of bids and conversions to get a positive ROI. I had
>one guy with deep pockets bid up a term and we tried to stay up with
>him. However, ROI went way down. I decided to cut my bid in half and
>accept much lower placement. Though this reduced traffic in by half, ROI
>doubled.

If you found that the cost of your Adwords doubled when you were up
against one other bidder, imagine what it's going to be like now
that 10 - 50 - 100 other site owners in your field wake up to realise
that they have to outbid you if they are going to be on Google again.
The cost of your Adwords campaign is about to soar and maybe you too will
be out of business. By then, the owners of Google will very rich people.

>If businesses can't make a profit bidding on keywords, gross
>bidding may decrease for Google, leaving them only with bids from big
>corporate clients than are willing to buy consumer awareness without
>regard to ROI for online resources.

Yes - this is what's going to happen. The likes of you and I have been
dumped from the free rankings. We're about to be priced out of the
Adwords, and the big businesses will take the business and just pass on
the costs to the consumer.

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Robert Day rpday_at_btinternet.com
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Received on Mon Dec 08 2003 - 08:22:01 CST