by Avneet

Is Google Really Empowering Smaller Websites?

“We’re living in Google’s world” said Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag when he recently doubled the amount of spending by Nextag on Google paid search engine. The step followed the decrease in traffic, from Google’s search engine to Nextag, nearly by half in the last few months. This costly move was imperative for Nextag as an estimated 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic comes from Google including free and paid search ads.

When they talk about inquiries on Google, it sure makes people think, is Google doing something wrong? It may not! There are no allegations. But there are doubts that people have, they are confused about the algorithms used by Google (which is highly confidential) and when your money is involved you ought to raise eye brows to anything that affects your business!

Google has attracted a lot of attention by officials after it has expanded to more than just search and search advertising. Its strong-growing expansion from more than just ‘search’ has given Google a competitive foothold in the industry, where there are more than 200 million businesses are striving to make it big every second. Google is huge, has funds, has resources and is a major resource in itself, but does that suffocate people (other businesses) at any level?

The question is, “Is Google favoring its domains like Google Shopping, Google Plus Locals etc. over its competitors?” Google occupies majority of real estate on a search page with results from Google Shopping, Google ads and Google Maps on the same page. Even if your website ranks high in organic search, you might have no visibility in the search results page due to Google’s monopolistic presence.

Another point of discussion not in favor of Google at many places remain that there are many who feel that Google is parochial and closed. People who feel this have not been able to get desired answers to their queries from the corporation or rather no answers at all. The communication reciprocation by Google is not satisfactory but here you can’t blame the giant who runs results from more than 240 million domain names, where people search using Google more than 3.3 billion times a day. Nevertheless, Google has been taking a lot of steps like hosting video chats for website owners, publishing blog posts about change in algorithms etc. to maintain communication with people across the globe.

Monopolizing or not, the aim as per Google insiders is that they want to keep on refining the search for its users and if the websites can’t go along with that, well they’ll have to work harder or bear the penalty.

Let’s see what other algorithmic changes have in store. If you have any doubts, contact us and we’ll do an audit of your store and tell you how vulnerable you are.