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Why Does Google Hate You So Much?

posted on August 11, 2010


By Jim Kukral

Google hates you, and they love you (your money mostly).

This is the very first thing I try to communicate to new students who want to understand their future relationship with Google. And make no doubt about it, as an Internet Marketing professional, you WILL have a relationship with them, if you want any chance of being successful that is.

Google is a business. They make billions of dollars from advertisements. I have read that up to 75% of their income each year is from those same ads, probably more. When you buy Google Adwords, and you pay $1.00 (for example) to bid for the top position on your favorite most search for keyphrase, Google takes a tiny piece of that $1.00. Imagine that happening 10 million times a day or more.

Now imagine 75% of your yearly income coming from one thing. You’d want to make sure that one thing never went away, right?

The truth is that because Google is a business, they are purposely trying to NOT let you rank organically. Why? Because they want you to buy lots and lots of ads.

It’s really that simple. I’ve always argued that if they could, Google would go to the telephone book method of largest advertiser gets the biggest ad in the most viewed place. Fortunately, us, the searchers would revolt if they tried to do that.

Instead we pretend that Google really is free and fair.

Of course it’s really not. The chances of ranking in on the first page for a super-competitive term are 10,000 to 1, or worse. Yet because it’s still possible technically, we still believe it can be done. The reality is that to get on page one (organically) for something like “debt consolidation” will mean you’re competing with businesses that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on seo firms. Probably even more.

Discouraging.

Ever wonder why the infamous Google algorithm is so highly guarded? Ever think about why they essentially got rid of the importance of pagerank? Google’s job is to make it as difficult as possible for you to rank for free so you are forced to buy advertisements. Benchmarks like pagerank helped us figure out how to rank without paying.

Yes, Google hates you. But they love your money.

The good news is that because Google makes so much money, they really care about their future. That means they work overtime to keep out the junk and let the high-quality, problem solving content rise to the top.

Google is a business. Don’t ever forget it.

Note: Someone once said to me something that is very true that made me sour on the search business even more. He said, “You know why you dislike search Jim? It’s because you play by the rules.”

About Jim Kukral

For over 15-years, Jim Kukral has helped small businesses and large companies like Fedex, Sherwin Williams, Ernst & Young and Progressive Auto Insurance understand how find success on the Web. Jim is the author of the book,“Attention! This Book Will Make You Money”, as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant. Find out more by visiting www.JimKukral.com. You can also follow Jim on Twitter @JimKukral.


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  • http://blog.mccom.com steveplunkett

    I was going to write some long response.. then i realized.. people are going to try and make seo confusing for the general public to sell PPC.. i’m not going to change that…

    Google has one rule that you should follow:

    “Provide the most uniquely relevant content for the search query.”
    If you are doing that and using good solid html and not chasing the algo.. you should have no problem.

    you got it backwards, FYI…

    If Google doesn’t provide the best results the quickest, then people stop using them.. and then.. THEY STOP SELLING ADS… soooo… it’s not Ads that come first, it’s quick, quality results.

    Good Luck with the book. =)

  • http://trafficcoleman.com/ TrafficColeman

    Jim

    Google is Google …meaning till someone comes along and compete with them..then they can do what they want..They got the number one search engine and video site (YouTube) and now they trying to compete with facebook on developing their owner social marketing site.

    When will the madness stop Jim? Google this..Google that

    “TrafficColeman “Signing Off”

  • http://seophoenixinternetmarketing.com Urban

    I get the point here but I have not had a hard time ranking well in the organic results. My problems are with Google Places suspending my account every time I update it!

  • http://www.rwebconsulting.com Web Consultant

    Google is trying to return the most relevant webpages to a search. In the past your website was either optimized for a keyword phrase (in the first half page of Google’s SERP or you were nowhere to be found on the Internet. What’s the alternative? To randomly display any relevent webpage (even if Google doesn’t think its the best match) for a particular keyword phrase?

    With Google taking into account a person’s browsing history, their location, other websites visited through the Doubleclick cookie their Search Engine Result Pages will become more personalized (and even better I would argue).

    They are in the business of returning the best organic search results (period). If they aren’t able to do that than their Adwords business model is completely irrelevant b/c people will start using other search engines like Bing.

    ps. I guess they could explore using alternative ways of displaying their search results (kind of like they do with images?)

    Cheers,
    Rob

  • http://www.blueskiesmktg.com Laurie Macomber

    I’m an avid SEO’er – and I believe if you rank for long and mid tail terms, you’ll get more highly qualified traffic, since their terms are more specific and less coveted by the competition – you’ll have a better chance of ranking. And when you DO rank for the mid tails, you’ll have a good shot one day at ranking for some head terms…… just by virtue of your demonstrated subject matter expertise on adjacent topics.

    I always say: With PPC you can buy your way to happiness – with SEO you earn it.

    $6B a quarter isn’t chump change, is it?

    But we can KNOW that Google does honor content in organics – useful content fully demonstrating expertise. We can win the algo wars – be subject matter experts and be useful!

  • http://backupchain.com Paul

    I agree with the article. Google is a corporate-sized scam and unfortunately it’s apparently legal.
    If you guys think that it tries to keep the best search results coming, then the questions is: better than who? Yahoo and bing are now married providing pretty much the same crappy results. Where is the searcher going to go? Google has no competitor. Who has the 100s of millions required to host a similar computer center to compete with them?
    A huge market entry barrier, that’s all they created. They suck with search, or actually they are very smart with it making all that money. It depends how you look at it….

    I have used Google since the beginning and I don’t see much of an improvement. They got smarter, however, with taking our money for ppc, which is also loaded with click fraud.

    the real problem is that people haven’t realized google is actively ranking the search results in such a way that no one bothers going beyond page 2 (they put more irrelevant pages right there to stop you). Then the webmasters feel they need to pay for ppc to get out of page 15 and finally become visible.

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