Search Engine Expert says "Google Sucks My Chia Pets"

Ihategoogle Anyone who has worked to get a high search engine ranking or has launched an AdWord pay-per-click marketing campaign knows there is only one game in town: Google.

Experts who optimize Web sites say that Google is a beast to work with -- it's a Fortune 500 corporation that is No. 1 in its industry with $6 billion in annual sales and 5,700 employees. Montreal's Gab Goldenberg of Bookworm-SEO, a search engine optimization service, summarizes the reasons in a great post "Google Sucks My Chia Pets."


10) Google needs to adjust its TrustRank algorithm.  It's giving too much weight to old domains/seed sites. Spammers are dominating the 'buy Viagra' search engine results pages: .EDU sites keep getting hacked, having pages with links or redirects sending visitors to pseudo-pharmacies.

9) Google's tech support teams have a tendency to want to copy-paste the FAQ in their email responses. Thanks, I can read the Q&A myself, Mr. Google-tech-support-bot. If I'm writing you, it's because the FAQ wasn't satisfactory.

8) Google serves all those useless, generic, bid-increasing eBay ads. Plus, it enables people to do arbitrage on AdWords traffic -- the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same commodity in different markets to profit from unequal prices. This hurts the little guy trying to make a buck on being a Google affiliate if you're going to serve all those eBay and arbitrage ads? It's not the small affiliates that suck, Google, it's your hypocritical policies.

7) Google places extreme trust on Yahoo paid links in the Yahoo directory  -- but then it tells webmasters to put "rel='nofollow' attributes" on their paid links, so those links won't get any credit when Google ranks websites in its search results. If paid links are such a concern, Google shouldn't get editorial-review and paid links confused.  It should just develop another standard and ask Yahoo to use them too.

6) Google's expansion into so many different markets and control over such a wide array of personal information is downright scary. And the fact Google has been willing to work with China in censoring information Chinese people may want to find doesn't comfort me one bit.

5) Google AdWords doesn't actually fulfill its promise of letting the little guy compete. Before embarking on an AdWords journey, one has to scour forums for information on targeting, match types, bidding strategies etc. The result is that the main AdWords buyers are eBay, spammers, arbitragers and big companies. The great equalizer it ain't.

4) On a note related to #6, Google keeps on buying out the little guys -- like YouTube, Urchin web analytics and Applied Semantics domain-name company. Reminds me of another big tech company that's infamous for the anti-trust lawsuits it's been hit with (hint: its ticker is MSFT).

3) Google claims to be so concerned about keeping spam out of the search results, yet it lets so much garbage be advertised on AdWords. I can't even count the Clickbank get-rich-quick scams people are hawking through your Google AdWords ads (ironically, the scammers present themselves as get-rich-quick review sites that prevent people getting scammed). It's 2007 Google; Western society gave up "buyer beware" in favo
r of consumer protection last century.

2) Google's Adsense for content-matching algorithms are awful, particularly in Gmail. The ads you've served me with when I check my mail are completely irrelevant, making for a sucky user experience and generally sucky "researching mode" rather than "buying mode" leads when people click.  Anyways, before you keep buying out the Jotspots of this world (a wiki hosting service) Google, make sure the ads you can serve on them will be relevant.

1) You're big, arrogant, and your algorithms are such a mess that you're likely to rank this post #1 for "Google Sucks" by the time I'm done promoting this.


With irony, Gab Goldenberg notes that her post "10 Reasons Google Sucks My Chia Pets" has a No. 12 Google ranking.

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Comments (3) Read through and enter the discussion with the form at the end
Zach Katkin - February 11, 2007 8:19 PM

I disagree with almost every item.

I'll be creating a detailed rebuttal at my blog (http://www.thenapkin.com & http://www.webdesignid.com/blog) shortly.

Wayne - February 11, 2008 11:35 PM

I am seeking people with Google Horror Stories to post on my site http://www.googlehorrorstories.net. The purpose of my site is to build a repository of first hand experiences that will travel the Net to eventually put pressure on the big G to resolve some of thier most basic problems. The more people who get involved and the more people who syndicate the articles the better chance we have of making a difference. Please feel free to post your article today!

jim conway - January 2, 2009 6:23 AM

If google keeps going to your website and keep taking
your pages down, and do not put your pages in the
search engine, then you should put the following
in your robots.txt file

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-image
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow:

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