Summary

Before Google, most search engines produced rather terrible results when you tried to search for something. And they were spammy pages that barraged your senses with all sorts of banner advertisements and animated graphics. Some search engines even tried to confuse users as to which search results were natural results versus paid advertisements.

Google came along and single-handedly cleaned up the industry. Google showed us what a simple, clean search engine interface should look like, and they developed a technology that produced such strong relevancy in search results that it quickly became the Internet standard. And in their spare time, Google created a pop-up blocker technology that they gave away for free, which now protects tens of millions of users from obnoxious pop-up ads.

Google has done an extraordinary job of creating the world's best search engine, and it turns out that was just the beginning. Soon after, Google invented Adwords, which represented nothing less than the next generation of evolution in online advertising. Although pay-for-position advertising was pioneered by overture (then Goto.com), Google took it one step further and began counting relevancy as one of the determining factors is ad position placement. This forced advertisers to create relevant ads, and not just throw more and more dollars at search terms. Today, Adwords is an extraordinary marketing tool for companies, individuals and organizations in virtually any industry. My own company spends thousands each month on Google Adwords, and it's the best advertising investment we've ever made, bar none.

Yet all of this wasn't enough for Google. They wanted to allow advertisers' ads to appear in other web sites that deliver topic focused content. So they invented Adsense, a system that allows publishers to earn revenues by displaying Google Adwords ads on their content pages. Adsense allows content publishers like NaturalNews to benefit from an enormous base of Google advertisers without having to engage in the administration or marketing normally required to attract and maintain a large number of advertisers. We focus on writing great content, and let Google figure out which ads to display.

And in that task, Google excels. With the help of technology they adopted through acquisition of a company specializing in language analysis, Google created a technology that allows an automated system to read the web page of any publisher and instantly determine which Adwords ads should appear on that page. The results are almost spooky: the ads match perfectly, almost as if they were chosen by a human being who knows what they're talking about.

Each of these three interventions by Google -- the superior search engine, Adwords relevancy based advertising, and Adsense which marries the interests of content publishers with that of advertisers -- would be extraordinary inventions on their own. That they came from one company at such a rapid pace is downright astounding. And yet, despite all of this, Google takes a lot of heat from people who seem to forget the way things used to be.

There are entire web sites and message posting boards dedicated to a group of people I call "Google whiners" who sit around and talk about how terrible it is that their own web sites dropped in ranking with Google's latest technology update. I know all about this, because I used to be a Google whiner myself. But I discovered it's far more practical to spend time creating outstanding content then bitching about Google with a roundtable of people who seem far more interested in "beating the system" than producing anything that real people would want to read in the first place.

There is a steady stream of new Google whiners, of course, because for every 10 web sites that achieve new rankings with each search engine update, there are exactly 10 more web sites whose rankings are no longer what they used to be. Thus, with any Google technology update, it's a given that a certain number of people are going to be angry. What they don't realize, however, is that they don't own those ranking positions in the first place, even though many of them act like they do. Some of these people think they automatically deserve certain high rankings as a reward for the number of hours they put into working to beat the system. What they need to realize is what I learned years ago: Google is smarter than you think, and probably much smarter than you are. Plus, they have the advantage of being able to see their own source code, whereas you can only guess at it.

So stop trying to hack your way to the top of organic search results in Google and, instead, start thinking about the purpose of your web site in the first place: delivering useful, practical, or entertaining content to real people on the net. If you do that, you will naturally and automatically attain very high rankings in Google, and you don't have to spend hours each day fiddling with web site source code and fretting over variations your web site might experience with each Google update.

Original source:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/2004-02-04-google-cover_x.htm

Details

• When business turned south last year at Corrugated Metals in Chicago, it turned to Google, the Internet's No. 1 search site.
• Co-owners Ken and Tom Carlton spent $200 a month to get an ad for their business to pop up when someone searched for "roll forming," a process that turns metal into different shapes.
• "Within days," says Ken Carlton, the ad "generated millions and millions of dollars in sales.
• He charges $1,500 to $5,000 to help make Web sites "Google friendly" and get them in Google's index of 3.3 billion Web pages.
• Companies pay because about 80% of Internet searches are performed with Google technology, says online newsletter Search Engine Watch.

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