There was a time when being like Google was a worthwhile goal. They did almost everything right with:
- clean user-friendly interfaces
- high quality results
- no or only unobtrusive ads
- reliable free services.
Those were the days when copying Google was really a good idea.
Over time – as most people got increasingly dependent on Google – bad business practices have crept in. Other companies are seemingly copying them despite that. The search traffic monopolist can get away with it. You can’t.
Common bad business practices popularized by Google
- sending mails with a “noreply@” address out of the blue
- requiring identification just to see content or use service
- removal of features people use a lot without prior warning
These are just some examples of many more commonly made mistakes online by businesses that have been first “popularized” by Google.
Sending mails with a “noreply@” address
Google does not earn money directly from their customers that is people who search. Nor is their business model catering to the needs of companies other than those buying ads from them. Thus there is no customer service neither for search users nor webmasters, hence the noreply@ mail addresses.
When Google writes you it’s not a conversation between equals.
It’s an announcement from an entity above you. It reflects the power they have over you while you have none. It’s a strict top-down relationship commonly encountered outside of democratic countries or inside corporations.
They may tell you that your site has been penalized but you have no way of directly responding. There is only an anonymous and presumably automated process which serves another purpose, of self-incrimination and denunciation. To be clear, only Google representatives stay anonymous.
There are two reasons why Google can get away with this condescending behavior.
- You depend on them
- They have power over you
Switching to the competition is either impossible or it would take too much time and effort. That’s, of course, a simplification but you get the point. I have switched to DuckDuckGo and had used Blekko before that as my default search engine so it’s possible as an end user at least.
An average business or even worse a startup just aiming to get popular can’t behave like this.
I understand that you may not be able to provide customer service because you’re too small and you are not keen on exploiting Asians for outsourcing. What can you do instead of not letting people reply?
Add a feedback community like the ones Get Satisfaction offers to your site or harness other means of social support. Forums are probably the oldest one. Even Google itself has forums where other webmasters have to help those victimized by the search giant.
Please take note that in the case of the example message on top of the paragraph, I have never consciously subscribed to their messages. I’ve just installed their free WordPress plugin and I have recommended it here on Ahrefs. The “tips” mentioned in that message were faulty so I have written a reply for them to fix those issues. Sadly only then I realized that their address was noreply@siteapps.com
Requiring identification just to see content
A common so-called growth hacking technique these days is to require visitors of your site to sign up just to see the content or use the service. While it might fuel some short term growth statistics because some people really sign up just to take a look at what’s inside that you ostracize probably the large majority of visitors.
Imagine a real life store the owner asking you for name, address, age, etc. before you are even allowed to enter!
Hotels can do it in real life but they have at least a comfortable lobby. They need to know who you are for security reasons and to make sure you pay them. Google can make you sign up to generally known and accepted online tools like Gmail or Google Analytics. In contrast, why would someone want to sign up the first time s/he ever heard of you?
Even Google has lots of services that do not require identification at least not right away. Google Fonts are free to use without giving away private data. Software like Google Web Designer does not require identification. You could assume it only happens in niches Google does not control yet with strong remaining competition. Google Trends does not ask for your ID either.
Removal of features people use a lot
When you give someone a present, the person will remember and like you. When you take it away, s/he will hate you though. Just imagine how it feels like being a kid and getting a teddy bear for Christmas and your mother taking it away half a year later after you got used to it already.
With Google, it’s even worse. They are not part of your family, not even a friend. Some features (not only entire tools or services they have killed over time) that worked fine for years silently disappear over night.
Quite often Google lures you to use a service or tool by offering a new feature just to remove it later on.
A recent example of this was the removal of author images and Google+ follower counts from search results. Once Google identified and registered most writers and publishers out there, they simply removed both and later on even the authorship stats in Google Webmaster Tools. I have never really trusted the Google promises to disclose my identity in the first place but was stupid enough to finally give in after my publishers asked me to.
Well, you are still forced to use Google Webmaster Tools. Google might penalize you and only disclose it in there. Also they are hiding referral data elsewhere and only show them on GWT. As noted above, you depend on them.
Do you remember Blekko? The advanced search engine for power users that used the so-called “hashtags” to curate search results and offered free SEO tools for webmasters too? I was probably one of its biggest brand evangelists. I loved how you could optimize the search engine itself.
I was curating some official hashtags -/architecture among them. I also used and recommended their free SEO tools. After all they were about real transparency. You could look up any site and why it ranks on Blekko.
One day they closed the public access to the tools completely and demanded to pay a monthly retainer higher than many other competitors with fewer features.
This way they ostracized webmasters and the SEO community, their probably most ardent users. Later on they redesigned their site and removed hashtags, too. You could find them by using the old version but the new version apparently got rid of them. So I stopped contributing. The last issue that finally made me drop Blekko almost completely was when they decided to localize their results without an opt-out.
I live in Berlin, Germany but I like to search international and American websites and news sources. Instead, Blekko (like Google) pushed lower quality German search results on me. I finally switched to DuckDuckGo and made it my default search engine. I still use Blekko sometimes but I don’t recommend it every other day. When I do, I always mention DDG first.
It would be very easy for Blekko to add a feature to de-localize results. I even contacted the team about it, but they haven’t even bothered to reply. I speak German so it’s not a major problem but what happens to Americans living in Germany or visiting as tourists?
(CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by Simon Carrasco
