Last week I posted two pieces about recent problems I’ve been having with Google and their page-ranking system. In response, I received a number of comments from people familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as it’s called. One of those comments, from Ladyjean, a website designer and SEO expert who runs a John Lennon site, Absolute Elsewhere, was especially interesting and deserves wider attention. So today, I’m running it as a guest post.
By Ladyjean
I have a couple of other things to say about the effectiveness of Google in general.
1) It’s very unlikely that anyone will be personally “picked out” by Google for punishment, unless they are breaking all the rules that Google has set up about how people should construct and code their websites. But in regard to that, I have to ask, who died and made them the ruler of what everybody can or cannot do on the internet?
If you do break their rules, you may not get a good ranking, and yet, no one in the SEO business is actually 100% sure if that’s really the case, because spammers get away with doing that all the time. That’s the problem: Nobody really knows how Google determines anything. In that regard, Google has behaved like a tyrant who is determined to control how people design and use their websites (or blogs, etc.), and they have succeeded in periodically tormenting and abusing anyone who wishes to do anything of value on the internet, and even worse, they have decided who the winners and losers are going to be based on their rankings.
2) The initial idea that Google was (and is) this great, amazing search engine is a myth. They have been completely fooling the world about this since they achieved their major takeover of internet search, which was quite a few years ago. You DO NOT get the best results on any Google search you do, but no other search engine is providing that outcome either, because it’s impossible to achieve that result. The internet is too massive. When you do a search, Google says it has found, say, 653,000 results for your query. But you will be lucky if they actually provide you with even a thousand of those links.
Because of my profession and personal interests, I have done a lot of “deep” searching on the internet, sometimes as far as it is possible to go (dozens of pages) and the end result is disturbing to say the least: You get a handful of what is actually on the internet, and the truth is, you can’t get to the rest of those links, at least not with a search engine. Google is one of the biggest shams in modern high tech history.
There, I said it and I feel better.