What Google Gives, Google Can Take Away

Google’s power is amazing, but also sometimes a bit frightening. For several years, I wrote for a website dedicated to the auto and travel industry. Through saavy, but fair, search engine optimization and linking, it managed to generate 1.5 million visitors per month.

Then, the recession hit, and the site gradually lost visitors. Ad generated revenue began to decline, and the website was forced to lay staff members off. With less and less people to tend to the site, and ensure its Google ranking stayed high, the decline began to feed on itself.

By the start of this year, however, numbers were starting to climb again. The site was down to only 100,000 visitors a month, but the trend was in the right direction as the editor began to work at recovering more and more of the SEO it had lost.

And then, on February 24^th, Google implemented a new algorithm designed to rid their results of link farms. Apparently, a small percentage of legitimate websites were adversely affected. This particular website was one of them; literally overnight they lost 50% of their remaining traffic.

The editor spent the month of March calling, writing and emailing Google to alert them to the problem, with no luck. Google simply called them ‘collateral damage’ and said it was tough luck.

The editor hasn’t given up yet, though. She continues to aggressively pursue a strategy to promote her website on Facebook and Twitter, along with a blog.

It is easy, sitting in class, to simply think of SEA as a game with rules to play and a clear path towards winning. Hopefully this example shows that isn’t always true—simply due to someone unknown change in Google’s algorithm, a legitimate business can lose half its business and be forced into layoffs. When so much power rests with Google, the results may not always be fair.