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Google Bowling and why The Future of Google is at stake
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The Future of Google from a Black Hat SEO perspective and why you should sell your GOOG stocks… for now.
SEOs that try to beat the search giant everyday know Google will soon face a major challenge not easy to solve: Google Bowling. That, on top of the Click Fraud advance and the hostility of TELCOS and MEDIA companies’ big bosses leaves only one way out.
ZapFuture.com user DrBakali became fairly well know for having predicted, back on 2004, Google stock price would rise the way it did. However, and this time, I am on a different note; and a very dark one, indeed.
My late experience doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultancy tells me Google will face a major near term challenge, with no easy way out.
The importance of Google is measured by the relevance of the search results it produces. People will use it as long as it returns promptly and accurately what they are looking for. Being one of the top search results is the holy grail of every page on the Internet. It means visitors, it means money. Everyone is battling for that exposure.
Techniques for achieving top positions vary and range from “white hat” Google supported optimizations to the most aggressive link spamming “black hat” hacks and hijacks. In case you’re not in the SEO business I can testify you it’s a real nasty war.
Google has been winning the war… till now! Radical “black hats” have been enriching uranium and have developed the ultimate technique: Google Bowling.
The concept is very simple. Google detects and penalizes everyone who heavily uses the so called “black hat” techniques to rocket promote their pages and boost their rankings. So, even thought some might achieve to put their pages on top results for some keywords (words people used for searching) this is usually very short lived as Google is fast to detect and ban this pages from its indexed network of sites. (BMW Germany got recently banned). But such effectiveness ended up creating a great “black hat” tool: if you want to have you concurrent company web site being banned from Google and thus hurting it’s revenues real bad, you just have to follow all the more nasty “black hat” techniques and use them to promote your concurrent web site (you don’t need access to the site). Then sit back and wait for Google to find that out, you can even report it for faster results. Welcome to Google Bowling.(cont)
So, and because Google doesn’t own the network it will never know who did what and, believe me, they ban first (for a long time) and ask later.
It’s a major challenge to solve. On the one hand, in case Google loosens its ban policies, “black hats” will turn the battle on their favor real fast and search results will become full of spam pages in no time, on the other, if it doesn’t it will start hurting really innocent webmasters, banning honest pages. Pages that Google users would also like to see as a result of their searches. And for the first time, it’s out of their hands because they can’t have access to all web sites logs to check who did what. I am pretty sure that’s one of the reasons they’ve started offering a free web site statistics service recently.
But being Google involved on so many new projects, like Mail, Talk or Maps, why does it still needs to be THE reference search engine? Because people prefer the reference as it’s the one that best serves them and, it’s free. But on the Internet, people shift free service providers on the blink of an eye, and Google lives from traffic.
99% of Google’s revenue comes from its Adwords and Adsense networks; an over exposition to only one source of incoming. These networks are responsible for showing the ads on Google’s affiliated web sites and/or every time someone searches for something on Google.com. The more traffic Google gets, the more clicks and money they collect. That leads us to the next challenge: avoiding Click Fraud.
We’ve all heard about some Google Click Fraud cases being easily settled on court. The fact is that they are very few. Why? Because today, Google can still easily detect and discard clicks from proxies and they represent 90% of the fake click. However, when privacy becomes a bigger issue and people start using proxies more and more, it will be another major problem.
Being Google Bowling the mother of all challenges and Click Fraud the father, we need the Holy Ghost; and that’s Accessing Content! Telecommunication bosses have already threatened Google the "free lunch" won’t last long, saying Google is making money using their bandwidth and media giants argue Google is making money using their content.
Google has only one way to go in order to maintain leadership: own the network! And, for what we’ve been hearing lately, it is indeed going that way. Google has been buying dark fiber cable and making experiments on Wi-Fi. (Already offering access on certain areas)
So, my fellow reader, in case you’re an investor and own a piece of GOOG, sell it while you can and buy it again a couple of years later when Google finally introduces the Google Network. In the short to medium term, I foresee some trouble waters for Google.
Disclaimer: I do not own any GOOG shares or shorts.
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