An imagined plausible truth behind the recent Google SEO Panda and Penguin updates
It’s all about the money
So I have this theory (most probably not just me) that the recent Google SEO Panda and Penguin updates as only somewhat helpful to the consumer but actually are dark cloaks behind a big scheme — reclaim back lost advertising revenue money of their Google Adwords business due to loss of advertising budget market share to Facebook.
Context
Businesses / online businesses that have ethical, good organic search engine links pointing back to their sites enjoy a large amount of organic search engine traffic from Google. Online e-commerce shopping sites, premium paid service sites, and other sites whose main revenue comes from online business transactions enjoy huge chunk of revenues from organic search traffic. Businesses also do paid Google search advertising.
Before Facebook
Before Facebook was born, Google (mostly) and a few advertising platform providers enjoy all advertising revenues from companies who do paid search advertising. Of course, businesses will spend money in a site (like Google) where most potential traffic will come from. Google also acquired Blogspot (blogger.com) and made easily available their Adsense program so that bloggers can earn money from ads displayed on their blogs. Google also enjoys displaying ads on Gmail- but hey who bothers to click on ads when reading or replying to emails? Right — clickthrough rates of Gmail ads are low. The numbers are pretty much hidden somewhere we suppose.
Enter Facebook and Facebook Pages for Businesses
Facebook was born. A huge chunk of audience (well a large part of us, right?) started spending a lot of time on Facebook. Instead of making blogs some people choose to use their Facebook walls to share stuff, post their thoughts and all. Facebook was so easy to use and control that one would wonder — who would need to create a blog anyway when it is a lot easier to post on Facebook, find your friends, get them to like, comment on your stuff without guestbooks with easy moderation (just click “X” to hide or delete a comment!). A large amount, long-tail new blogger sign up projections lost for Google.
Facebook Pages for Businesses: Companies have amassed large cult of following in Facebook and many have made it their online presence extensions. Why not? It is easy to reach and every action made by your existing fanbase echoes through their walls and reaches through their friends (or friends of friends, or public, depending on their settings).
Facebook advertising is born
Facebook’s audience share has grown to wild proportions, and Facebook Advertising was born. Businesses were able to reach a more targeted defined audience base through Facebook Advertising and have allocated marketing advertising budgets for Facebook Ads.
Uh-oh and so Google’s paid search and display …
For many small-medium businesses who had fixed annual budget had to split their ad budget spending and naturally, most naturally they have allocated some if not a large part of it for Facebook Ads. Why not? Targeting was more precise and it is easy to get someone’s attention when they are not seriously replying on their emails and just browsing updates from their friends. Count hundreds and thousands of these long-tail businesses and you’ll have millions of advertising dollars going to Facebook’s Ad revenues. That’s loss of revenue for Google Advertising. Looking forward a few years more, that will be a large, large sum.
GOOGLE SAYS, LET’S LAUNCH GOOGLE PLUS TO GET THE MONEY BACK
They tried but sadly Google Plus up to now enjoys a tiny share of audience, and usage compared to Facebook. It is not enough to get the Ads rolling and get the paid click revenues back for Google. Google has to face it, their Google Plus platform is only friendly to people with web or developer mindsets. They should fire the UI (user interface) designers of Google Plus simply because it is not easy to use. Some people we know would also not create a Google Plus account simply because of fear of tying up their personal email accounts to a public / accessible profile. It really doesn’t sound like a good idea. Google should have rethought their Google Plus product a hundred times before they even launched it. Now that we think about it, Google should fire their whole Google Plus division.
An act of desperation?
So Google now have to try to get their Paid Search advertising revenues back. But how? By launching “search engine updates” publicly declared as methods to combat search result spam and increase relevancy for the searching consumers. But is it?
1. Did you notice any improved relevancy in your search results for the past 6 months? No- you saw a large amount of sites with old articles appearing on top and a large amount of sites on your search results that is somehow not too relevant. Searching for articles or pages on specific topics will pop up webpage results from 2009. How relevant is that?
2. Did you notice any significant decrease in low quality websites appearing on your search results? When clicking on them do you think they have provided better content than what you would usually see a year ago?
There you go.
By launching their recent Google SEO Panda and Penguin updates, Google was able to hit on many long-tail small to medium sized businesses, prompting these businesses to increase their paid search advertising budgets immediately to get back lost revenues or be able to hit their target revenues for the year.
TO SUMMARIZE
- In every Google SEO update, small to medium to a few large-sized businesses lose relevant share of organic search engine rankings.
- These relevant organic search engine traffic contribute significant amount of revenues for businesses.
- Facebook is amassing and continuously amassing marketing advertising budget spending simply because they have a platform that is able to reach a more targeted audience for businesses. Google Search Advertising business is losing a large amount of money from this competition.
- To claim back projected revenues for the year lost from the drop of organic search referred traffic due to Google Search Engine Panda and Penguin updates, businesses will have to do a lot of additional paid search advertising on Google.
- To claim back projected revenues of Google Search Advertising, Google launches candy-coated “Search Engine Updates”, publicly guised as helpful updates (are they?). These search engine updates prompt thousands of long-tail businesses to spend money on Google Advertising again.
This is written by me as an online Marketing executive who have constantly experienced a huge loss of forecasted revenue coming from Organic searches from Google whenever they do “search engine updates”. Yes it messses up my forecast big time, every time, hence this story (which is plausible, right?). No one’s gonna be able to prove it though, and hopefully this story will not be blocked from its search engine results.
