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Are All Your Eggs In Google’s Basket?
By Jim Kukral | May 8, 2007
Sure, we all love Google, as we should, they are the most relevant, most widely used search engine. But when you really think about it, being so completely dependent on Google is scary.
Case in point, look at this story from Forbes, courtesy of Dane Carlson’s excellent blog.
Don’t anger the Google gods.
That’s the lesson Paul Sanar learned–too late–last year. Up until last fall, the 21-year-old New Yorker depended solely on the search engine to keep traffic flowing to Skyfacet.com, his online diamond business; Sanar says he sold $3 million dollars worth of jewelry a year. Then, he says, Google turned its back on Skyfacet.com, condemning the site to Internet obscurity.
Beginning in September 2006, Skyfacet no longer showed up on the first few pages of Google’s results when users typed in search terms like “diamonds” and “engagement ring.” The site’s traffic vanished, and Sanar says his sales dropped $500,000 in three months.
What happened? Sanar isn’t completely sure. But he does know that his site has been condemned to the supplemental index, a dreaded backwater region of Google search results that goes by another name in online marketing circles: Google Hell.
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