Comments on: An Open Letter to Google

By: Guitar Player

Guitar Player — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:20:00 +0000

It’s a shame that mistrust of Google seems to be growing… until a few years back they were seen by most as whiter-than-white, but I guess its inevitable that it can’t last forever. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Let’s hope that the powers that G can keep things on the straight and narrow and not turn into another Microsoft.

By: Martin Edic

Martin Edic — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:53:55 +0000

There are a number of misconceptions here. they have a blackbox to improve results for searchers- otherwise the system would be riddled with non-relevant results. Google’s business is built on two concepts: intent and relevance. If they stray from these their search business will suffer and providing great search is how they make money.
Domain parking creates a major quandary for them because parked sites are rarely very relevant- they piss searchers off. Domainers for some reason seem to have a real fear of developing great relevant content on their domains but that day is coming for all of us.
As for MSN search, good luck with that. There’s a really good reason google has 70+% of the market- the others really suck.
Get great content on your sites and these problems disappear.

By: Seven Mile » Blog Archive » An Open Letter To Google

Seven Mile » Blog Archive » An Open Letter To Google — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:48:38 +0000

[...] http://domainnamewire.com/2007/11/19/an-open-letter-to-google/“”; [...]

By: Leonard Holmes

Leonard Holmes — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:01:53 +0000

I agree with Richard. Give them a call. You might even reach a human that will help. I had a Google rep call me about a campaign one time and their suggestions were really helpful. They tweaked some of my ads and included elements that are usually against the rules. I guess some of their rules can be broken once someone from Google gets involved.

By: DomainerPro

DomainerPro — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 04:16:17 +0000

I’m frustrated too, and I’m gradually moving all my ad campaigns to Microsoft Adcenter. I’m taking a hit in the process, but Google Adwords has become so unpredictable, so capricious, and Google customer service so unresponsive, that I have no choice. I’m a small fish, true, with only a $1K a month budget, but that’s $1K that will be going into someone else’s pocket from now on.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:33:09 +0000

Fair point, Japh. We’re working on a new landing page right now.

Google believes the computer is always right. Perhaps they should run 500 or so impressions and see if the ad is getting solid click throughs (and perhaps conversions). What humans do is more important than what the computer thinks.

And I’d think that it should still pick up that the URL is VirtualVentures.com for relevancy

By: Japh

Japh — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:20:47 +0000

Hey, while I can see your frustration and Google certainly are starting to get too big for your boots, I suspect the main reason other pages (including this one) rank higher for the term Virtual Ventures is because those keywords appear here more than on your landing page.
Have you tried doing some SEO there? the term Virtual Ventures, while it is in your domain name, does not appear even once on your virtualventures.com home page… the closest is the word “venture” which appears once, and without the word “virtual” anywhere near it.
Surely this would help Google re-categorise your site as relevant?
As Google say, if you view your site in a text-only browser, such as Lynx, and aren’t seeing your keywords… then GoogleBots can’t categorise you with them.

Make sense?

(Sorry, I’m not trying to tell you how to suck eggs or anything, it just seems like an obvious solution to me…)