Three European web sites alleged Google of anti-competitive behavior and said that, the Internet search giant was unfairly steering traffic away from them.  The three sites: Foundem, a British retail price comparison site; ejustice.fr, a French legal search engine; and Ciao from Bing, a Microsoft-owned shopping site that operates in Europe, alleges the search engine magnate, Google, of deceitful conduct.

The lines sound interesting and surely demand a pondering. Let us try to uncover the story, where lies the problem, why is the giant being probed?

Google AdWords, PPC, Bidding rates and Click Through activity…

All of us are aware of Google AdWords, it is the PPC Advertising service offered by Google, through which it displays click-able links from advertisers, in exchange for a charge per click.

PPC requires the advertiser to bid on key words in order to buy a top position in the search engine results for a particular keyword. Google determines the placement of the ad based on the bidding price and the ad’s click-through activity. The advertiser pays for each click made by a search engine user, through which advertisers’ web page gets a reckoning and is ranked accordingly.

Google AdWords is a powerful advertisement arena, by Google through which it is managing PPC sites. The problem is that, Google is being unfair by promoting its own products on every page it springs out. Google is indexing itself first amongst the PPC sites, whenever any keyword is searched for, here is the catch. Even if the keyword is not related to Google AdWords or Google Maps or some other Google product, Google is systematically favoring its own products, and indexing it foremost on most of the pages delivered by the search engine, irrespective of the keyword.

The service protocol of PPC, assures the advertisers, that their web sites will be delivered to the audience targeting the keywords, and the advertisers have to compete with their adversaries for the ranking through bidding and click through activity.

Let’s view this in affect:

If someone in US wishes to search for ‘SEO Service’, then the resulting page which Google shoots forward is like this:

We all know that “Google.com/AdWords”, is not a SEO Service provider…

What’s fraudulent here…?

No doubt, Google is unfairly steering away the traffic, by ranking the other sites lower to its own site, thus decreasing the click through activity and increasing the bidding rates. Moreover, it is violating its own protocol of delivering the clients’ link to a visitor, appropriate to the keyword being searched, by posing itself as a competitor to most client sites, irrespective of the keyword.

Let’s wait and watch the ramifications…

So now, when the titan is undergoing antitrust scrutiny by U.S. regulators, and is facing the music, let us see how it handles the ramifications of the allegations it has been alleged with.

• You visit a SEO company and it guarantees you a ranking even before analyzing your website. These SEO analysts are either are just interested in extracting money from you and stuffing it in their pocket or they take SEO too lightly. A SEO strategy is different for every website and the optimization strategy depends and changes according to the nature and theme of website.
• Some just fill in the Meta tags with absurd keywords and create spamming. Your website might end up getting banned by Google. Increasing Meta tags list with irrelevant keywords is no SEO technique.
• Some SEO people create doorway pages that are held on another server and then they purchase this traffic to shell out more money from you. Make sure the SEO changes you pay for occur on your website only.

Quality of SEO analysts

• A good SEO analyst is always aware of the fact that the tactics of the search engine algorithms is ever changing and the same old techniques do not work for every website.
• A good SEO will never guarantee results on SERP because anyone who guarantees is sure to be a Charlatan. A good SEO will guarantee that they ill be driving the traffic on your website which will guarantee sales.
• They should be able to tell you exactly what they’re doing, and how much the cost is for various parts of the service.

A Few Important Tips

• A good SEO firm will try to get itself involved in rebuilding of website if it is done. They believe in avoiding the pitfalls like excessive use of Flash, HTML frames or graphics at the early stage because modifying them later on becomes a nuisance and waste of money.
• Make sure you check the references of the SEO Company on your own and check from the owners whether they are driving more traffic and having more sales.
• A really good SEO is no joke. By limiting the budget to less than a thousand dollars, you will be indirectly limiting the creative abilities of the SEO analyst. Pay more to get his focus on your site more. Also by finding some one working on much less pay scale is like finding some one who is willing to take your money for doing nothing.
• It is east to blabber about SEO techniques by reading from book. But when it comes to actual action, no reading helps as SEO environment is ever changing and dynamic. Do not fall for such blabber and research the work done by the SEO Company for other websites.

Search Places for Good SEO Analysts

• Visit the SEO forums. There you will find many companies posing as SEO experts. But the genuine ones will shine out on own.
• Search for SEO related articles found on sites such as Clinks, ISEDB, Search Guild, and Search Day
• You can trust the ones recommended by your friends. But for this you will have to trust your friend first.

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