OneAndOneIs2

Or, "Cursed to have to actually pay for advertising"?

Slashdot links to a story in which a few businessmen complain that, following their websites being mislabelled by Google's algorithms as spam-type sites, they lost huge chunks of revenue as they ceased to show up on the first few pages of Google searches.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it hard to have sympathy for these guys. In this context, Google is essentially providing free advertising. All they're seeing when Google reassigns their pages are the effects of having a business that nobody knows about because it doesn't advertise.

They could reclaim their "As seen on Google's first page" status easily, by spending the cash to buy an advertising slot on it. The people in the article sell diamonds. Plugging "diamonds" in as a search term yields the following ten results (using google.co.uk):

• Wikipedia
• Diamonds.com
• Original-diamonds.com
• approveddiamonds.com
• 4csdiamonds.com
• diamondgeezer.com
• qualitydiamonds.co.uk
• thediamondjeweller.co.uk
• cooldiamonds.com
• dejoria.co.uk

However, the top and side of the page, where the adverts are, link to:

• CoolDiamonds.com
• jf-k.com/diamonds
• purelydiamonds.co.uk
• bluenile.co.uk
• diamondgeezer.com
• RageStones.com
• zsdiamonds.com
• 77diamonds.com
• diamondsonweb.com
• TheDiamondStore.co.uk

Only two are on both lists. So all the other diamond sellers in the second list are probably doing a pretty good trade courtesy of links from Google, even though they aren't in the first page of results.

I'm sure the guys in the first list aren't complaining that they're getting the same amount of exposure for free, but their place is (as Forbes reports) considerably less secure.

If your business relies on people seeing you when they do a Google search, perhaps you should consider actually paying to make sure they DO see you?

Failing that, you could at least not whine about Google damaging your business when they stop giving you a top-spot for free.

Having said that, I'm frequently on the first page of Google's results, particularly if the search is something along the lines of "linux windows", so:

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