[grey-area]

In principle, I'd agree that relying on another company is not a sound business strategy, but Google has a virtual stranglehold on organic traffic to websites, something that is outside the control of most web companies.

How do you suggest a web-based company should counter that and not rely on google for much of their business?

[wmf]

Marketing? You know, advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc.

[grey-area]

Many of those channels rely on guiding people to search engines, or at the very least being findable on search engines by name. To take this example, your website is called portrait quilts, the url is http://portraitquilts.com/ - so you do loads of advertising on twitter, print media, word of mouth etc, and people try to find your site. You can try to guide them to a unique url, but often people won't remember urls, but names, and are encouraged to use this method by the blurring of urls and keyword searches in browsers.

So they open up their browser, type portrait quilts in the address bar, which redirects to a search, and your website is on page 8 despite being an exact match on the search. Game Over.

Seems your other channels are not quite as effective as you thought if google decides to penalise or blacklist your site. If you're off page 1 or 2 you may as well not exist. Of course from Google's point of view, you'll just have to advertise with google, so this doesn't penalise them at all, in fact they are rewarded monetarily for arbitrarily shifting rankings periodically (not that I'm suggesting that they go out of their way to do this, just that the perverse incentive is there).

[wmf]

One free thing you can do to optimize marketing is to not name your business a generic term. If your business has a unique name you generally don't have to worry about competitors outranking you for the name. For example, I don't think my brother will ever get outranked for "porcelain rocket"; he currently owns not just the top spot but the entire first page.

[grey-area]

Plenty of products/services like Windows, Xerox, tipex start as generic terms or become them during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they should therefore always come first, but it's instructive if you compare xerox to this website - they dominate the entire first page of google results. What should come first is what would be useful for end users, and I think it's fair to expect a company named after and with an url of a phrase to come at least once on that first page, if lots of people link to them (as from other search engine results they appear to). If that's not the case, Google should be transparent about why these penalties are applied. I understand why they don't want to be transparent for commercial reasons and to stop people gaming the system, but think given their monopoly position it behoves them to be so. Otherwise they can destroy businesses maliciously or, even worse, with complete indifference.

Personally I find Google is providing results which are less and less useful, with their recent emphasis on monetising search, indifference to fairness, and lack of transparency as to their ranking methods - it certainly seems as if in this case a draconian penalty has been applied, and there is no effective way to appeal or even find out what the judgement against them was (webmasters very often is not helpful). A penalty of a few places would be completely understandable if they don't like this site for whatever reason, a penalty of 8 pages while other spammy results dominate search terms is not.

I've switched to DuckDuckGo for now and it's pretty good. Compare the results for Tipex (a popular brand of correction fluid in Europe) for example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipex https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipex

[DanBC]

The brand is "Tipp-Ex".

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipp-ex

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipp-ex&oq=tipp-ex&gs_l=se...

http://www.bing.com/search?q=tipp-ex&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&filt...

http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=tipp-ex&lr=87

http://www.dogpile.com/search/web?fcoid=417&fcop=topnav&fpid...

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=An3Le.5YQeHZ499qBVnAQ...

[grey-area]

Thanks.

[sliverstorm]

But that costs money!

;)