By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive

I hope that everybody had a great Thanksgiving. I’ve spent the weekend broken down with the flu, which is the perfect time to lie around and think. This morning I was thinking about Google. In the last two months we have had 4 companies call us because their “free” listings disappeared. A couple of these companies dominate their category and had excellent listings under countless search queries to go along with rather hefty investments in Google PPC. The other two sites relied on “free” traffic only. These companies wanted us to use our connections at Google to “turn the switch” so that their listings would reappear.

We discovered that each company was out of synch with the Google webmaster rules in some way or another; but not in an egregious manner. In fact, these companies had been bending the rules for years. Why now I wondered? Was it just coincidental that these companies were nabbed right around the same time or was there; is there, a larger but hidden agenda?

Many of you may not remember this but in 2003 Yahoo! without any advance notification, put together an editorial team to go through their network for the purpose of identifying and pulling down every banner that didn’t meet spec. These reviews began over a weekend but were ongoing. The Yahoo! sales team was playing footloose and fancy free with the banners, often displaying advertising that was too large or too heavy.

Without warning those banners were pulled. I’d guess you’re probably wondering how Yahoo! was able to get away with it. Keep in mind; that was a different time. It was a sellers market back then.

I’m speculating here but what if Google did the same? What if they put together a team to go through their “free” listings, identifying those sites that weren’t completely compliant, and pulled them off of the page? What would that company do? There are no organic listings reps at Google. It’s not an easy thing to discover what is needed to be done to restore the organic listings. It takes a lot of time to discover why a site has been penalized or blacklisted, and it takes even more time to fix the problems once identified. Those companies would have no choice but to start spending on search or increase their PPC spend if they already have a paid search presence, right? What if Google penalized and blacklisted companies for practices they tolerated when times were good; so that they can continue to drive revenue lift in buyers market during a recession?

I’m not saying they are. I have no evidence to support the paragraph above but what if? Is it fair or unfair? Do business people ever care about playing fair? Or is their sense of fair play subsumed by the demands of doing business?  Google is an entity unto itself, and it must grow. One way to do so, in my opinion, would be to force companies to buy more advertising by taking away the “free’ stuff.  

It’s probably a good thing for companies that are relying on “free” traffic to be forced by circumstances to start spending in paid search anyways. I question whether companies relying on “free” traffic only, are real businesses. Real businesses control quantity and scale. Real businesses know what’s selling and why.

You may have noticed that I wrap the word “free” with quotation marks. It’s a term someone invented, but if you think about it, there is no such thing as “free” traffic. Companies pay substantial SEO fee’s to keep their site optimized for better page rankings. As my business partner, Mark Brown likes to say, “Paid search is the 24lb. turkey. “Free” traffic is just the gravy.” A company can’t track or reliably scale organic traffic. It can’t be optimized. Organic page rankings are very important but as part of a fully developed, tested and effective marketing portfolio. 

In closing we were able to get the organic listings restored for those companies rather quickly. They were uncomfortable when we told them the truth as to why they were penalized but, ultimately, grateful that we have to resources to quickly heal the injury. If your company should lose its listings, give us a call. We’ve developed a number of best practices while helping the aforementioned companies amend their situation. We could save you a substantial amount of money in terms of lost conversions, market share and branding opportunities. 

Remember, Google is the world’s biggest advertising agency. The services it provides are means for selling advertising. Don’t ever forget that.