Sometimes when we report changes about search engines its like we are doing a henny penny. But this change is dramatic for the people of Australia and those that buy dog treats online. You will now only see 1 or 2 ‘organic’ companies on the ‘first page’. And then they are often large corporates who bought their way into those results too!
The initial cause of this kind of misinformation (search engines putting dodgy treat companies at the top of search results) is caused by the profit imperative of the search engine companies and can be easily traced back to the IPO them. When the big G’s two original idealists owned the company they promised that their searches would be based on integrity. Things like the most informative sites, accurate information and currency of articles matter a lot. NOW They don’t.
And in March 2016 we are headed for a very bad innovation as far as real information and quality sites go.
Since the main search engine in Australia has 85% market share, and it went public, most of the idealism has been lost and converted into shareholder wealth The first things people noticed after the IPO was that all of a sudden large corporate sites that paid search engines a lot of money for their online advertising, mostly on the right hand side of your search page, all of a sudden got a boost in the ‘organic’ rankings. Now those same advertisers were magically shown at the top of the centre of the page.
Small dog treat sites could no longer compete with the massive marketing team in global dog treat companies, so they did things like ask other sites to do reciprocal links with them, if they trusted them, this was exactly what the original search engine results were based on, peer review. Then all of a sudden these things were banned and actually made the rank of small dog treat sites worse. It wasn’t because these metrics could be manipulated (they could), it was because large sites couldn’t be bothered and had no integrity to swap links with legitimate sites that cared about dogs, and made healthy dog treats.
The last major change to slant the click-throughs in the direction of large corporate companies with low nutrition treats and low meat amounts was to create a SHOP on the top right of the search page. These shops are expensive to set up and expensive to run (Google gets a lot of money from them). You will also see that they have little regard for what the advertiser says, with things like searches for “healthy dog treats”usually including pictures of products that are little more than flour and water, no meat.
The latest changes to search engines manipulating the dog treat market
Whether you understand how pushing legitimate sites and information further out of reach affects you, consider that a site and business lives and dies by the customers they get.
Consider that businesses that are almost 100% online but can’t afford to advertise against the giants in the dog treat industry just get pushed out, not on merit, but by being priced out by advertising dollars. And a lot of that tricky advertising is with Loss leaders, the large businesses selling a product at a loss just to get your click and our attention away from the REAL dog treat sites at the bottom of the first page and on page two etc. This is just making it easier for that to happen.
This is the original concept of putting the ads at the top of the search page, and then the creation of the SHOP.
NOW the latest ‘innovation; is said to be the major search engine, moving their ads from the right where they aren’t seen enough and doubling the ads at the top of the page.
Originally organic (ie genuine dog treat sites with great product and current information) where shown company one through to five or six on your screen without scrolling down.
Even now before they take up more room up top, You will usually only see 2 – 3 organic search results before ‘Images for Dog treats’ then you will have to scroll the page to even see the THIRD dog treat company.
Since the first two companies are usually large corporations with big SEO spend, or a wiki article, you are not going to easily find quality dog treats without effort.
Why scrolling kills dog treat online companies.
It used to be said that the first three companies would soak up 80% plus of the clicks on the page, just because human nature has us humans to be lazy. 20% of clicks were then shared between the last 7 organic search sites on the page.
Then with the increase in advertising on the search pages, the organic results for the whole page might get 50% of clicks if lucky, so the top two organic sites now get say 80% of that 50% page total clicks, and the rest of your results (dog treat company 3 to ten get 10% of all page clicks).
Just by the nature of the algorithm liking companies that pay the search engine company more for advertising also giving them an organic boost, AND now the increase in ad space at the top of the page is going to send many good real dog treat companies to the wall.
Currently the position of the THIRD organic search dog treat company is taken up by random “images for dog treats’ that ridiculously happen to ALL be WHEAT BISCUITS – and two of the four images on the Australian version of this global search giant are American !
NOW more than ever, if you want quality real meat based dog treats for your dog, because you believe in their health and aren’t just going to take what dog makers skimp on, you are going to have to search much further and wider !
If these guys paid any tax, and the government had any concern for the people, there might be an inquiry into the business practices of these companies pretending to present a level playing field.
