Online Marketing: Google Quietly Changes the Rules
By Israel Rothman

RISMedia, August 5, 2004 - So perhaps you have noticed that Google has changed the rules of the search engine game again?

“The rule” that most search engines use to increase a page’s rankings is based on what is called “indirect submissions,” or when the “spiders” (search mechanisms), find and submit your page by way of another page that is linked to yours.

Google, however, has reversed this by changing the formula by which it searches. Now every time your page is “over-submitted,” meaning submitted to the search engine even though it is already listed with it, your ranking goes DOWN! In fact, I believe that your ranking will be higher on Google if it “spiders” the page without it being submitted.

This development is just the latest in a series of changes that Google has made to make it almost impossible to optimize a page. Your only option for broad real estate-related searches is to pay Google for “AdWords.” This seems to have backfired for Google, once hosting 80% of Web searches, but now hosting somewhere around 30-40%. (See: http://searchengine-watch.com/report...le.php/2156451)

At last check of our statistics in mid-June, of the over 1.1 million hits per month that our free ads site gets per month, Google has again become our largest referrer from search; although in May they had fallen to third place behind Yahoo and MSN.

The reduction was due to the fact that a lot of the hits on the Web still come from the “open source movement,” or, those who believe no one should have too much power over the free commerce and sharing of ideas and programming. I believe Google has abandoned this movement in its effort to increase revenues prior to its I.P.O. See: http://www.open-source.org/

Solution: stop submitting to Google, let them find you on their own for the best ranking.

At Ads For Free, Inc., we take a different approach. We have over 500 companies that we absolutely guarantee first-page placement to for their chosen search words, which we accomplish by giving away free Web site ads and auctions at www.adsforfree.com.

We notice every hiccup: stop submitting to Google now!

We’ll let you know when it changes again.

Israel Rothman is the CEO and founder of Ads for Free, Inc. and HitMyPage.com. For more information, visit www.hitmypage.com or www.rismedia.info.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: editorial@rismedia.com

My newest website was indexed by Google within four days of going live. The URL was brand new and the site is brand new. I was pretty happy!

But now after reading this, I am worried that my host is about to submit my site to all the SE's, including the big G.

Are you positive it will hurt me?

Worried...

__________________
Matt Pellerin - Phoenix Homes Team Leader
Selling Paradise Valley real estate, Phoenix real estate and Scottsdale real estate.

Unless you work for Google then no one can be positive about any rumour or apparent change to how Google works.

It's all rumours IMHO.

Darren

I've had my theories about this, but I tend to believe it is untrue. This opens things up to sabotage. If Google looked at the number of times a website was submitted through its Submit-URL page, and penalized those who submitted too many times, then anyone could sabotage someone else's site.

What would stop me from submitting the URL for this message board to Google a 100 times?

I don't think Google will open itself to that.

__________________
Steve Johnson, blogger
http://www.realestatehow.com
Tips for real estate agents on SEO and Website design

google is actually very good at covering it's own ass and before it implements something, it makes sure that it can't backfire on them, and can't be as easy to manipulate as this would make them. What they'd run into is people sabotaging other people sites. I can't imagine that google would not notice or think of this. That's also why they wouldn't do it.