Google on the Slippery Slope?
Interesting little article appeared last week on theregister.co.uk about Google's ongoing problems in the search business.
Now I'm not some high flying webmaster with a million a month unique visitors but this article rang a few bells in my head.
Firstly, Google's search results have been on the decline for some time now. Choked with spam, price comparison sites, affiliate links, link farms etc etc getting to the real information has become practically impossible. Personally if I'm searching for information I tend to identify the site with a popular forum community on the subject and search through their archives first. For example, If it's anything to do with AV hardware then it's off to www.avforums.com I go, if it's something I'm looking to buy I'll check out user comments and reviews at sites like Amazon and so on. Where I used to stumble upon interesting sites through searching on Google I'm now more likely to find interesting links through blogs, I'm sure I'm not alone.
Secondly, Google's indexing of this site has been piss poor for a while now. The search site function seems to be completely borked even although I've changed nothing in the code.
Thirdly, my adsense revenue, which reached a quite respectable peak in December, held fairly steady through January and February and then fell off a cliff from March onwards. The amount I earn from the adverts is small (my December peak was $21.45 for that month) but enough to notice that something has happened beyond my control.
Google on one hand earns it's revenue from sponsored links but it needs the traffic from providing solid search results to drive that revenue. I wonder if Microsoft or Yahoo! are planning anything different from Google's business model for their text advert systems?
posted by Ricky Dee at
7:51 PM
2 Comments:
Agreed - Google isn't as efficient as it used to be although I've found the shopping links are less invasive than they used to be.
I'm amazed you made $20 in one month. Thats very impressive and a lot more than I thought you would generate especially as they are not really in the way.
By
Ian, at 8 May 2006 20:43
... and my site content is crap :-), I know what you mean.
It amazed me too but it did build steadily towards that figure, dropped to $18 and then $16 for Feb and March and then less than $5/month since :-( that's why I think something's up.
Whoops, I don't think I'm supposed to talk about earnings.
By
Ricky Dee, at 8 May 2006 20:53
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