End of the Google Love Affair?

End of the Google Love Affair?

The world moves not in incremental changes but in leaps and it seems no more so than in eCommerce. The rise of Google from a start up of 1998 to where it is now is a perfect example of this. This rise has given Google it’s current monopoly position, driven by its clean interface and usability to make it synonymous with the word ’search’. With the users have come merchants, gold panning for clicks, building their sites around SEO, investing heavily in Adwords to drive the elusive consumer to them.

However, there are indications that this might not continue indefinately and as Google starts to use it’s monopoly to invade areas that might be considered beyond ‘organising the world’s information’ is it still not being evil?

This isn’t about the smugness with which Google corrects your spelling or knows what you are looking for before you do but seemingly minor changes that may in fact be gnawing away at some of the underlying assumptions of the eCommerce world.

Paid over Organic listings

I recently overhead a CEO at a nameless company saying he wanted SEO to put his own PPC agency out of business in two years, under the assumption that a successful SEO campaign could make up for any loss in PPC revenue. That is laughable. Google wouldn’t let that happen. In fact I suspect the other extreme may happen, Google will know what terms are revenue generating terms and then start pushing organic listings further and further down the page.

This is already starting to happen.

1. They are moving ads closer to the organic listings

2. New ad formats are including sub headings, visual elements, maps – all pushing organic listings down the page.

Organic listings

Google, if you ask them outright, does not provide SEO advice, the quote goes something like “make the site easy to use and navigate and Google will rank it well.” Which is kind of ignoring the elephant in the room. Everyone is aware of the SEO industry, each with there own line they believe shouldn’t be crossed in order to avoid Google’s wrath. However with very few culprits being caught and punished many merchants are no doubt tempted to flaunt the rules as short term gains may outweigh any ‘punishment.’ So no one is sure where the grey line is and what they can get away with. Creating gateway pages like BMW did – wrong, but will you get caught? Buying links? Not sure and very unlikely you could ever be caught. Anyone trying to play by the rules is losing out so with big ££ involved you can bet everyone is pushing it as far as they can.

The result is that merchants who play by the ‘rules’ are missing out, as are genuinely pure white hat SEO agencies, and most importantly are the users who are not necessarily being shown the most relevant content.

New Google markets

Google have just launched the Nexus One. Bet alot of mobile phone manufacturers won’t enjoy paying their adwords bill this month. Same goes for the price comparison and aggregators with the increasing visibility of Google product search. What about analytics companies, cartographers, authors, news agencies? Google is happy to go open source with everything but it’s search algorithm. The profit it makes from its closed source venture allows it to be open source in new markets. As an end user it is great (I’m practically addicted to GA), but let’s not pretend it is altruism.

For example, Chrome is a great browser (my personal choice) but the ability to search directly from the url has the unwitting benefit of turning Google more and more into a navigation rather than a search tool. I predict direct traffic will drop as Chrome market share increases, with one more step before they get to you the chances of a customer being sidetracked to a competitor or a voucher code site increase.

Google dream

One industry to realise the Google dream might not be all it is cracked up to be is publishing. After doing everything required to get traffic from Google they have realised clicks aren’t the same as customers. A lot of people may be reading their news but their product is now seen within the freeconomic model. Rupert Murdoch’s wishes to move away from Google are understandable (if not fundamentally flawed.)

In favour of Google

Despite any appearances in the above article to the contary I am a massive fan of Google; the company, the technology, the people (and especially Google’s breakfast buffet.) This isn’t about reducing advertising with Google or ignoring the value of your organic search channel, the opposite is probably true and the winners will be the ones who recognise these changes as an opportunity rather than a pure threat.

But just like people are now beginning to see a bank isn’t a social enterprising piggy bank with nice free services, people need to recognise that Google is a large corporate enterprise with shareholders like any other. They don’t owe you anything and what you do get certainly isn’t free (even if it looks like it.)