The Google World!

Today, Arti left for Tokyo for a week on business…while she is away, I thought I will put my mind to work and come up something extremely intelligent for my blog. But it looks like its a no go, because I am distracted with so many things around me. I have been planning this article for three hours now and these are the first words I came up with…EXTREMELY INTELLIGENT!

Anyways, to drive it forward I recently signed up with Amazon for their DVD rental service, highly recommended by one of Arti’s colleagues. It is one of the cheapest DVD rental services available in the UK. My first batch of DVDs have arrived and one of the movies in the list is Wallstreet. It is a decent movie, but one of the lines in the movie is an all time classic. It just hit me that this could be made the premise for my extremely intelligent article, simply because its an incredible line. It goes like this:

…..that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much!

- Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wallstreet (1987)

Brilliant! I am not a wordsmith, but it is not easy to summarise your argument without dramatising it…that’s why there are instances when you have to borrow from fiction to drive your point. Greed is responsible for the creation of many things of which internet is one. Being in the Search Marketing industry, should I not write about the internet? But mind you, greed is not necessarily a sin. Greed for me is eagerness, hunger to achieve.

Internet is a funny place. It has provided tremendous opportunities to organisations and individuals alike, but only for those who know how to effectively optimise their search marketing strategies succeed. Nevertheless, with the rise of internet audiences and online commerce, internet has blossomed as a sophisticated advertising medium. Businesses have effectively used this medium to grab recipient attention. However, in this funny place called the internet, businesses have to work collaboratively with Search Engines to make recipients realise what they need. This is where the real dilemma lies.

Working as a Marketing Analyst for an online business, I have realised that search engines have powered the internet into a level playing field and if used effectively, can be highly beneficial to dependent entities. Ever since Google entered the search engine market, the internet landscape has shifted completely. Although, it means a better place for users seeking information to influence their decisions, very few users realise what goes behind to make such information available.

Google’s dominance is such that it dominates the search engine market with a share of nearly 80 %. So it is practical for every business to direct their marketing activities towards it. But instead of a collaboration, online businesses have been wrestling with Google and other prominent search engines to list them higher in the search engine result pages – the essence of evolutionary spirit. It is a collaboration in a weird sense. Nevertheless, Google’s complicated calculation of how pages are listed in search engine results has always kept SEO experts on their toes. For example, for the pages to be listed higher on the search engine results pages, apart from various parameters such as website optimisation, uniqueness and quality of content, Google also calculates the number of related inbound links a website has. This is where greed arises. Greediness has led to the creation of numerous sites which offer variety of link building opportunities, sometimes free and some times at a cost. However, the free link building opportunities seldom add value to the website as the quality of the link is always questionable. Paid links often come from sites with higher number of visitors and thus meaning higher page rank values. Although, Google never recommended buying paid links for a website, it never penalised websites either. However, a recent update of Google guidelines for webmasters indicates that paid links will be penalised.

Undoubtedly, greed has advanced the development of superior internet infrastructure in many ways, of which SEO is a part. In turn the eagerness to build quick links to their websites had led many SEO experts to paid links and has been a norm for most search marketing campaigns. With these new guidelines, what level of greediness will achieve a consensual satisfaction for all entities is to be seen. But greed will definitely lead the upward surge of the internet.