I don’t like Google’s innate conservatism
David Rosam on Apr 19 2007 at 9:21 pm | Filed under: Google, Search Engine Optimization
Like all start-up businesses, it’s tough enough for start-up sites. Then Google sandboxes them as well. And that’s just one end of the stick. Google actually prefers older, established sites with mature links.
While Cynical Dave says pushing new sites into using Adwords does no harm to its profits, my realistic side gives Google the benefit of the doubt - webmasters have been working at a huge number of ways of gaming the search engines, so it’s hardly surprising that new sites have to prove themselves before being let out on to the natural search results fairway.
But that means your new site has to work hard. As I often find myself saying to clients, the big hitters have been there for a decade or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. And with the current algorithm they can be just about impossible to dislodge within realistic budgets.
What worries me is what this bias towards older sites is doing to the Internet. Is Google’s innate conservatism strangling some new sites before they even have a chance? Are the odds being stacked unfairly against 2007’s online businesses?
I’d personally like Google to evolve its algorithm so that it can tell which of new sites are spam and which aren’t. And stop weighting the Net in favour of the old war horses.
