April 30, 2007 Comments
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It seems funny that just after I wrote about the Ten Commandments of Search, I stumbled across a Forbes article called "Condemned to Google Hell" that examines the often confusing issue of Google's supplemental index. The article includes interviews with several businesses that have found themselves banished to the supplemental results and also features a few quotes from some well known search marketers.
Andy Greenburg writes:
Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.
Google's programmers appear to have created the supplemental index with the best intentions. It's designed to lighten the workload of Google's "spider," the algorithm that constantly combs and categorizes the Web's pages. Google uses the index as a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results.
Those pages are scanned far less frequently than those in the main index, meaning that once a page is marked for Google Hell, it can languish there for as long as a year before Google even deigns it worthy of a reappraisal. And as Google tries to manage an explosively growing Web, more and more sites are finding themselves thrown into the search engine's digital dungeon.
For businesses that have found themselves tossed into the supplemental index, it's frustrating experience. Google remains tight lipped about what exactly causes a site to be placed there and it's even more tight lipped about how a web site can get back out.
That said, the very fact that it exists as a possibility underscores the very important message that you simply cannot run an online business that relies too heavily on Google. (Or any single source of traffic for that matter.) While Google isn't going to go away any time soon, the fact remains that all it takes is an indexing error and your site could vanish for days, weeks, even months.
Could you stay in business if you lost all of your organic Google traffic?
This is why it's essential that you not only work on diversifying your traffic source (links, links and more links) but that you also make sure you have marketing campaigns ready to go if the need arises. Building a quality opt-in email list and learning enough about pay-per-click to turn a positive ROI are two methods that can go a long way toward providing you with some insurance against a potential search snafu.
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