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Sarah Novotny is the Sr. Editor in Charge of Adotas. Sarah grew up in San Jose, California. Her educational and professional career have taken her to both Los Angeles and New York City where she received a B.F.A. from NYU. As a writer, Sarah has free-lanced for various publications focusing primarily on traditional advertising and media reviews. When not writing and editing for Adotas, Sarah is continuing her acting career in various theatrical and film/television productions.

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Is Your Company “Google-Dependent”?

Written on
August 3rd 2007
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davidgoliath2.jpgNow that Google has changed its algorithm, many sites are seeing a backlash that cannot be ignored. Answers.com has reported traffic to have gone down about 28% and ascribes this to the changed Algorithm of the search giant. Having an average of 3 million visitors in June, the loss has been significant.

Answers.com CEO Bob Rosenschein stated, “We are working diligently to analyze and address the recent algorithm change.”

Many companies have become dependent on the Google placement for traffic which translates into ad revenue and this concern has been buzzing throughout the internet since the company announced the now implemented change.

Although some big names are finding that they are not as “Google-dependent” as they thought, such as eBay, who reportedly pulled out their ad spending from AdWords for a ten day test period and proved to still be successful; smaller companies are not as calm about the situation.

There is still an exorbitant amount of site that function predominantly on ad revenue. These sites cannot afford to lose any traffic whether it is paid for or organic. This is causing companies to get creative. Rosenschein admits that this is a large factor that led to Answer Corp’s acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group. Lexico is the owner of Reference.com, Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com. The company is acquiring Lexico for $100 million in cash.

According to Rosenschein, the move on Google’s part is not uncommon among the major search engines and that, “This change only demonstrates the sound business rationale behind our agreement to purchase Dictionary.com, because it underscores a primary motivation for the deal: to secure a steady source of direct traffic and mitigate our current dependence on search engine algorithms.”

Google continues to make money and to become more and more of a verb. A spokesperson for the company was quoted to say, “Many of the changes we make, including regular updates to our algorithms, are focused on improving the experience for the users.”

And that essentially is their number one priority. How they relate to the users. Or so it seems. Will these changes inadvertently take down sites and force others to take a hard look at their own content? Has the internet actually become “Google-dependent”? And if so, what is the responsibility of large search engines to publishers and the smaller sites? The answers to these questions will become clearer as the next few months unravel.



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Reader Comments.

As the co-publisher of The Auto Channel, an editorial site with a million or so pages of REAL Content, all I can say is; Thank You Google and “Long Live Google!!! Our hope is that Google’s algorithms get smarter and smarter, so that publishers who really publish can compete with the big buck, buy audience sites.

Posted by Bob Gordon | 3:37 pm on August 3, 2007.

Yes, we have become Google-dependent and it’s about time to check-in to the Betty Ford Clinic.

Support your fellow junky and visit www.DelightfulDeliveries.com and help us kick the habit!

Posted by Eric Lituchy | 3:39 pm on August 3, 2007.

Google’s new algorithms have pretty much killed our site after nearly a decade of being a top 10 fixture when searching for recipes. We seem to have lost 95% of our traffic and have just laid off 40+ staff members due to the recent changes the article refers to.

I hope your organization will provide more in-depth coverage as this story unfolds.

Posted by Sean Wenzel | 5:32 pm on August 7, 2007.

Google updates are constantly closing the doors for some and opening the doors for others. Our very small website, http://www.freshfruitbaskets.com is able to compete against much larger companies, such as Harry & David, because of Google. Offline, this would be impossible. Go Google!

Posted by James Stiebel | 10:13 am on November 20, 2007.

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