Should Google Rethink its Algorithms and Policies
Google is a big organization. In fact it is one of the big organizations and is impossibly influential on the net. For this reason it’s fair to say that Google would never admit it made a mistake, that’s just the unfortunate nature of big business.
But despite the fact that they aren’t coming clean on this matter, most of us can still see fairly clearly that they’ve not done things perfectly lately and that they’ve put their foot wrong a few times. And in fact the current condition of the search engine is one of the worst it’s been in well… ever and there are plenty of bloggers currently picking up on the problems.
Think I’m just moaning? Here are just a few of the reasons that Google could do with taking a step back and having a bit of rethink.
Penguin Hasn’t Worked
Google Penguin was the most recent algorithm change that was supposed to punish sites that were using black hat techniques and over optimization in a similar way that Panda did and to this end it targeted spun content as well as large numbers of links from unworthy sources. The problem with this is that it removed a bunch of sites from the top spots that were simply trying to use SEO the way they’d been taught, and that then meant that nothing but dross was left over. Do a search for ‘make money online’ for instance and the top few results include empty blogs and cyber squatters. That’s hardly a sign of success and it’s not what Google’s visitors want to see. For this reason alone then, Google needs to rethink its algorithm.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO means that you do bad SEO for another site so that it gets penalized by Google, and so that you then have less competition for the terms you’re trying to rank for. That’s not really Google’s fault, but unfortunately Google’s recent Penguin update has only served to make these negative SEO strategies that much more effective. In other words at the moment Google is unable to differentiate between the sites that deserve penalizing and those that are victims of malicious attacks – and of course that’s not really ideal. This is something that Google is going to have to change as more and more people start cottoning on to negative SEO as an immoral yet effective way to boost their site.
Competition from Bing
I doubt right now that Google is losing sleep over the competition, but that doesn’t change the fact that Bing is gaining ground while Google is losing it. At the moment the gap is still rather large, but slips like the Penguin update could help to close that gap for Bing which means Google needs to be on its best behaviour over the next couple of years to avoid a search Engine with a company that has more resources and money.
Privacy Policy Issues
Google’s recent changes to their privacy policy saw them coming under fire from European authorities that saw them as a breach of their privacy laws. This isn’t only of course a worry in itself, but also bad publicity for Google who have been steering themselves toward some ‘market monopoly’ style strategies lately. If they want to reverse their fortunes in this regard then giving users back some of their privacy could be a good move.
Allen Beery runs an online business and has recently started branching out on an education related business by taking a Kumon Franchise. He writes about SEO, business opportunity and education.
Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/should-google-rethink-its-algorithms-and-policies/