Don’t Believe Everything Google Tells You
I was doing a little tweaking of a website for one of our Hervey Bay clients today and, out of curiosity I typed – best computer shop Hervey Bay – into Google’s search box.
I must confess that I’ve never heard of the top listing but this one was the second listing
This business has now closed and left many unhappy customers who would like to contact the owner.
I guess it goes to show that you shouldn’t always believe Google and it also goes to show you that user ratings can definitely be fiddled.
Edit: As one reader has pointed out, the page that Google will now show you for the term I talk about here has now changed completely. And I should point out that many of the results pages in just about all the search engines are rather fluid and do change quite often.
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Hi,
Google ranks websites based on which site it (google) considers to have the most relivent content on the keyword(s) entered in. So in this case it proberbly was the best most relivent option it could come up with. Maybe the others dont have websites or maybe there websites in google eyes don’t contain enough relivent information. There are many other factors that go into googles complex system of ranking websites, such as meta tags, links ect. But i dont think google would know or care that this business has now closed and left many customers unhappy. After all it is just a computer ranking these websites using complex algorithms that proberbly don’t take into account customer satisfaction.
I dont want to come across as a google lover or anything like that. But google is our friend, as website based businesses and can be a very powerful marketing tool if used correctly.
Regards
Chris
P.S I Dig your website dude
March 23rd, 2007 at 5:24 am
Hello Chris
Thanks for stopping by and adding your comments.
A large part of our business for quite some years now has been derived from search engine optimisation (we’re probably the number 2 optimisation specialists here in the Bay – like us, the number 1 guy is a home-based business and doesn’t make a lot of noise about what he does because, like us, he doesn’t have to) so we really do understand Google.
We understand that, because Google uses an algorithm, and only minimal human review, to rank sites, it can be fooled, tricked, gamed and manipulated into showing showing sites at the top of the search engine results pages that we want there, not necessarily the sites that deserve to be there.
Unfortunately many people do not understand that and accept that whatever Google shows at the top of the search engine results pages has to be the ‘authority’ site for whatever the person was looking up.
The original post was our little attempt to help educate people about the realities of Google
I’ve just been looking at your site too – you’ll find my number at the bottom of the right hand column – give me a call I’ve got a couple of suggestions for you.
April 28th, 2007 at 3:21 am
Ironically I stumbled across this site via the aforementioned Google and I must say that I found this comment -
“I must confess that I’ve never heard of the top listing but this one was the second listing’
to be a little bit disingenuous seeing as how the top listing is in fact Fraser Coast computers and I am pretty sure you do know them
April 28th, 2007 at 5:09 am
Hello Wyntar
Thanks for addding your comment – and I really do appreciate it because I hadn’t checked that term since I wrote the original post back in March.
At that time the site listed at number one was certainly a business that I had never heard of but listings in the search engines are often quite fluid and what was at the top in March could be nowhere to be seen in late April.
It’s nice to see the tweaking I was doing for that client produced the result I was looking for. I was also interested to see that the listing for Fraser Coast Computers isn’t the only listing I have on that page.
Out of the 10 listings shown on that page today – April 28, 2007 – our client has two and we have four more.