Sunday, July 16, 2006

Me in the eyes of goggle, my cyberspace adventure

The several months ago I thought I'd "goggle myself "or actually my company name in goggle. I do this once and a while to see if anyone really knows I'm out there. To my surprise I had been literally wiped off the Google world. I decided to try this on some other search engines, like Yahoo, MSN etc. I found myself quite easily, and even found myself by typing in a few words that I thought some prospective customers might find me by. I was surprised that I was listed near the top on some of these searches. I mean, the competition is fierce for someone in my industry and I've really never spent any money promoting my online presence.
Maybe I should consider it.... I've done a bit of business online, I don't sell anything on my site it's just informational stuff about my business. It's on some free space that came with my AOL account, I built the site myself and it's far from professional. I've had some people download me prints to quote and stumble onto my site that's led to some work. For what I have into it I can't complain.
So here I go with the complaining.... I've "Googled" my company before and always found it. Why is Google punishing me? Have I done something wrong? Am I just a small fish in a big pond? Am I not worthy anymore of the great Google?
I figured I better do a little research to find out what's going on. Well... I guess the online world has changed a bit since I put up my site several years ago. The first thing I did was to e-mail them. Not really expecting an answer I was surprised to find a response in my email. Turn out it was just a form letter. I'm sure they get lots of these requests. At least it directed me to their site where I might find some answers.
Well the first thing I found out was there are theses Robots or spiders I think their called. These scan the internet jumping from site to site though the links on the site sucking up and indexing all the information. I was to check for bad links to make sure I was not being penalized for being out of date. I did find some bad ones so I eliminated them. They also suggested I check my Page ranking. I downloaded some software and found out I had a ranking of 3 out of 10. Not great, but I wasn't trying to be the best site on the web, just included in the web. It turn out that these spiders have become very intelligent. When they scan your site they are looking for keywords to make sure your site is relevant or worthy of google. It turns out that people have learned to trick these robots and the robots have responded by getting smarter. They work on a formula that the call an algorithm. I also added a counter and updated the site a bit. I reapplied for submission and waited. A few weeks went by and I tried it again. Still no Mark Mold and Engineering on Google. I checked my ranking and to my surprise I was now a zero. I have made thing worse.
Back to the drawing table. I did a little more research and made a few more changes added a sitemap so the robots could navigate my site easier. I check out who was linking to me, I guess spiders like to see that people have linked to your site. When I did this before I found a hundred site or so linking. Now I have 3. I guess it's not only the sites that link to you but their ranking that goes into the equation, also the ranking of the sites that you link to play a part. I checked the ranking of the site I linked to, didn't figure I could do anything about the sites that linked to me. I dumped a few good sites but they didn't rank so they had to go. I kept a few that I though were important, if they penalize me I didn't care. I was already penalized. Waited a few more weeks for the robot to visit. Still no luck.
My guess is that Google has implemented this Adwords program where you pay for these keywords. When someone looks up your site using these words you have to pay them an amount of money that specify though a biding process. I wasn't interested in that. I figured that google tighten up their algorithm so they could make some money buy making people pay to get hits. I gave up on the process after many more changes and tries.
Several months have passed and I keep checking once in awhile but with not much luck. The Governor of the State of Michigan was on the News the other day and announced that Google has decided to bring a 1000 jobs to Michigan because of their new Adwords program. I guess Google is making plenty of money by tweaking their search engine. It's an election year and Governor Granholm wasn't going to miss an opportunity to get her mug infront of the Camera saying how she created some jobs. Unfortunately Michigan is still dead last in the country in job creation and has one of the highest unemployment rates.
I wrote a scathing article about Google the other day in one of the newsgroups, I figured they couldn't punish me more than they already have.
I just Google my company again. Guess what? It's back on their index. It still has a zero page rank and is about as far down the list as you can get, but at least if you type in Mark Mold you can find my site.

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