In December of 2009 I read an extremely interesting piece on the Telegraph website by Technology and Digital Media Correspondent, Emma Barnett. The piece was a write-up of insights into the future of search, from Google’s Marissa Mayer.

It was the title of the article that hooked me into the piece. Marissa Mayer: An omnivorous Google is coming. As a search engine professional and former Yahoo! I do enjoy the juxtaposition of “Google” with any word that begins “omni” and the Orwellian tint to prophesy that it brings.

Mayers’ insights include multi-lingual query translations on the fly, ring-fenced serving of social data according to user-to-object privacy settings and intuitive search. Barnett states “She [Mayer] wants Google to be capable of presenting information to users before they even know what they’re looking for. Amazingly she doesn’t think her team are that far away from achieving what she calls the ‘omnivorous’ search engine –i.e. one which is able to take a user’s total context – where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on.”

Since then I’ve kept this “omnivorous search” concept in mind, when considering Googles’ product releases, aquisitions and announcements.

Consider the recent shift to display almost a full page of results from one “brand”, which first came to my attention in this piece by Malcolm Coles. Shortly thereafter I read with interest a follow-up from Bill Slawski, who posits that such SERPS may be triggered by an understanding of part of the query as “entity”. Slawski points back to a patent awarded to Google in May 2009 (Query re-writing and entity detection), and expands that an entity may be a person, place or thing.

So what has that got to do with omnivorous consumption of information and intuitive search?

If I’m logged in and using personalised search, allowing Google to collect a great deal of history and session data, wouldn’t that in some part facilitate the compilation of “IPwhatever” and disposition towards an entity? Perhaps I have a history of interaction with the entity “Nine West”, and spend the morning searching for shoes. I may come back from lunch to find a collection of recommended URLs sitting on my Chrome browser background for Nine West slingbacks.

What Part Instant Search?

Aside from session data, query history, location and modes of contact (toolbar, web, mobile); behavioural data must surely inform a huge part of any intuitive search. Personalised search is certainly the first step towards that. Knowing how a user interacts with results; preffered sites (or perhaps even entities) per query go some way to building a picture of propensity to interact (or not). Behavioural feedback in this way is then after-the-fact, whereas with Instant search and the presentation of results mid-query, Google get the ability to understand user-intention at the outset. Which should provide a more accurate picture of personal interests, likes and dislikes.

I’ll give you an example: if pre-Instant Search, I search for “the divine comedy”. I’m presented with the following results, where the first result is the official website of the band, the second the Wikipedia entry for the epic poem by Dante, the third, another Wikipedia entry this time for the band and so on.

With personalised search, Google can record which site I may be most likely to interact with and may favour that site in any future query. Personalised search is therefore after the fact. Certainly, if I find that I’m not keen on this results set, which is composed of two entities (to remain with the vernacular), then I may not interact with these results, but instead choose to append my query with “band” or “dante” in the hope that the next result set will be composed almost exclusively of results for the entity I desired at the outset. I’ve learned that the query “the divine comedy” has dual meaning and disparate results, and that I should append my query. Google has learned that at point of first request, I did not find a result I wanted to interact with, then performed an appended query. I’m taking a shot, however; when I append my query. If I append with “dante”, perhaps that provides the right result, and perhaps “dante” is a known entity, and perhaps if this happens a couple of times and each time I click on the same URL Google may infer that I quite fancy content from that URL. What is difficult to ascertain from the point of user intention is does “IPwhatever” generally favour bands or books? Does personalised search create the sort of footprint that might allow for the understanding of how I interpret the properties of an entity?

I suspect the feedback-after- the-fact in this example, permits only a certain level of inference, with a certain level of confidence.

Google Instant however, surely affords the functionality to encourage a much greater level of refinement mid-query. As I’m watching my SERP change as I’m entering my query, I can choose to refine what I might have originally been about to enter as I seek to refine according to intention. A search involves much less guesswork at the outset. I don’t have to “hit and wait” in order to find out that my query isn’t coming up with the goods.

Of course such query refinement on the fly offers a much greater level of confidence in user intention from the outset, plus the ability to inform a much more detailed and reliable taxonomy of relational terms. As Eric Schmidt said “We can understand things like what you really meant.”

I agree with Barrett in her summation of the Marisa Mayer interview back in December “An omniscient, omnivorous Google is coming and it knows what you want, even if you don’t.” My only caveat to that, is that it’s already here.

I spent quite a bit of time last night playing around with Google instant, and watching all the activity on Twitter. It’s always amusing to watch the “SEO is dead” brigade find a new drum to bang. But getting into the office this morning meant that actions had to start being taken, and my process is the same as it always is when Google launches something new, so I thought I would share it with you:

Inform Your Clients

While you may be well aware of what is happening, your clients won’t, and they won’t necessarily see the impact that a change like this could have for them. Let them know that they might see a drop in traffic, and what your steps are going to be over the coming weeks. Think about the possible scenarios that the change could have, and outline how you are going to deal with them. Whatever happens, if you keep your clients well informed you will avoid panic if traffic does drop over the coming weeks.

Step away from analytics

As tempting as it is to spend the next few days steeped in analytics reports, stop. The fact of the matter is that anything you see right now will not be a true reflection of how people react to this change. it might be interesting to see how many people are playing with it, but old habits die hard, and there had always been a difference between how people use new Goggle features in the short & long term. It will take at least a week for the dust to settle and for people to start using this feature the way they will going forward, so stay calm and give it time.

Don’t Panic

if you can’t resist the temptation to look at your analytics over the next few days, for goodness sake, don’t panic. Don’t make any knee jerk changes to your strategy. If you have been working with a solid rounded strategy you shouldn’t have any need to. Yes there may be a need to change where you focus your optimisation efforts over the next few months, yes you may need to go back to the drawing board with some clients, but assuming you have done step one and your clients are kept well informed there should be no need for there to be anything to panic about.

Buy a lot of salt

and take a pinch of it with everything you read about “the effect of instant”. The world and it’s wife can spend 24 hours a day analysing the hell out of possible changes and repercussions, but it will take time for even the best minds to fully understand all of the effects that this change will have. Read the speculation and information that is being put out by all means, but use your own judgements, and don’t assume that anyone has the answers.

So there you have it, my roadmap to surviving a google feature change. The short version Keep calm & Carry on!

At SES Toronto I was one of three panellists talking about SEO from a decade ago to now.  I tackled the past while my fellow panellists tackled the present and future.  As always, I had so much more I wanted to say and thus this blog post.

I asserted that nothing has changed and yet everything really has.  At its core, the math for calculating relevance remains very much the same but layer upon layer of sophistication has been added turning the Google ranking formula a complex creature which is likely an engineering feat of mad genius.  I feel that Google engineers are extremely intelligent in their ability to conceive of, and execute the calculations surrounding, ways and methods of organising data on the web.  It’s also a bit scary in a I-could-kill-you-with-a-click kind of way.

A decade ago, I asserted in my talk, the fundamental aspects of the algorithm were fixed.  I feel the really major changes in how things are ranked happened more from 1995 – 2000.  I’m not saying nothing has changed at all, just that the core fundamentals upon which multiple layers of sophistication have been built seem to have been fixed around then.  These core fundamentals relate to links, title tags, on page text which is focused around a single theme, eliminating code bloat and using spiderable techniques.  That is as important today as it was ten years ago.

Ten years ago, it was easier to spam the index.  Buying domain names, creating duplicate sites and owning search results was much easier than it is today.  Spammers would buy multiple domains, create uniquely coded sites and small businesses would never get a chance.  Today while fairer, it is also more difficult for newer businesses to get ranked at times.  Today, the results are a lot cleaner, more diverse with higher quality.  As a searcher, I prefer the search results today and while I may at times miss what used to be possible it is better as it is and as it is becoming.

The world has also started to catch up with search and spammers.  Users are more ready to call out duplicate search results or businesses trying to own all of one search results whether for “Texas hold ‘em” or “bean bag chairs”.  They react badly when duplicity is revealed and they turn to social networks and a powerful word of mouth network further enhanced by the internet.  The law too has caught up making it a criminal offence in some countries to fail to disclose connections, free merchandise, payments or related activities.  Where before the spammer could move with impunity, the law is quickly catching up and making it even riskier to spam.

Today, we have multiple layers of sophistication and additional elements which go in to ranking each page of a site.  No longer are you dumped unceremoniously at the front door of a business from Google or Yahoo.  Searchers now experience richer results and dive deeply directly into the most relevant page of a site.  This is possible through a combination of factors including weighting the content of the whole site, the subfolder the page is in, the page itself, internal links pointing to the page, external links (followed or nofollowed) pointing to the page and mentions of the theme of the page in relation to the site but lacking a link.

To understand the future, we need to understand the past.  Core elements are more important than ever and must be correctly implemented in order to create a well optimised site.  URL structure, unique content, internal and external links (including breadcrumbs), keyword usage on page, themes on site and especially page titles are all very important.  The SEO Chicks are always releasing how-to blog posts about these fundamentals because they are so important.

In the future, the focus on spam elimination will continue and the network of ranking factors will become even more complex.  It has been many long years since an SEO could focus on only one thing and get better rankings.  A site owner, SEO or anyone trying to get a site more visibility online needs to ensure all core elements are in place from launch.  Once that is done, things like citations, social media mentions, social media engagement, and more will factor increasingly into rankings.  Since personalisation renders rank tracking almost irrelevant, analytics will take pride of place as a focus for improvements and on-page conversion analysis will help Google’s Web Optimiser become even more popular.

There is so much more to the algorithm now than there was a decade ago. Things like pagerank sculpting have come and gone, cross-domain canonicalization has helped reduce duplicate content issues, refinement in the method of recognising and eliminating spam links has dramatically changed the search results.  All for the better I feel.

So I woke up this morning, wondering what to write about for SEO chicks this week, and wouldn’t ya know Google has launched yet another thing that no-one needs. Perfect, this post will practically write itself!

The first I knew of Google starred results, was seeing the Search engine land post on the subject, so I did a quick check, and found that I still had search wiki, in fact as of writing this post, I still haven’t been moved over to the new system, and from what I’m hearing, I kind of hope that I get left out of the update all together.

@Seobegincom has been keeping me updated on his initial experiences of stared results for much of the morning, and it seems that Google is continuing it’s trend of giving us things that we never wanted, can’t switch off, and make life more difficult than it was before. So far some of the issues that seem to be appearing are:

• Google adding things to your google bookmarks, based on search history & auto categorising them
• Auto bookmarking sites from your public profile
• In order to prevent it tracking trends you have to turn your history off

This raises so many questions for me, especially as I have over 100 google bookmarks stored, and keeping them organised and findable is hard enough at the best of times, the last thing I want is Google coming in and messing with my system.

Secondly, with social search in place, as well as buzz, is there a risk here that people I’m connected to will see things I have bookmarked…eek, there are things in my bookmarks I do not want the world to see.

I just can’t see the point in this really, I think most of us are more than capable of bookmarking a site if we really want to, do we really need Google deciding what we should bookmark for us? There is little benefit to this over search wiki from what I can see so far, although having not tried it, there is still the chance that I will change my mind.

For now though, I just have to wonder why Google has adopted this throw mud at the wall approach of late, if it’s frustrating and confusing for those of us who spend their lives stalking everything that Google does, I can’t imagine how the less savvy Google account users must see this, or do they just not notice and let Google carry on with whatever they want to do with their accounts? Now there’s a scary thought.

I wrote a blogpost a few months ago on Searchcowboys about “How to use Multiple Sitemaps on the Same Domain for Geotargetting” and got a great response. Although a few of the readers commented that the instructions were a a bit “fuzzy” and that a step by step explanation would have been great. So I thought I would share it with the SEO Chicks readers and do a step by step guide on this method for geotargetting. But first, let’s get some background info on why and so on.

Issue and why we came up with this solution?
One of our clients (as so many other companies) have a .com domain targeting the UK, but in addition they are targeting five other European countries, on the same domain. They have (to their credit) translated content in each relevant language. The way that they are displaying this content is in quite simple and straight forward folder structure, i.e:

Samplewebsite.com/FR/
and further in pages like Samplewebsite.com/FR/page
and so on..

You might assume (wrongly) that it’s a strong enough sign for Google (or Yahoo or Bing) that the content is in the relevant language and thus know that you are targeting France with the above pages, but no. It is very unlikely those pages will rank anywhere in Google.fr for anything remotely competitive. This is because all other signs is telling Google that this site is targetting and focusing on the UK.

Now, I hear a few of you yelling: they should get country specific TLDs for each country. This isn’t always that easy, and for some countries like France, there is no way you can get a .fr TLD unless you can prove you have a business address there. In some countries its even worse, in Norway for example (.no TLDs) you not only have to prove you have an address and a company but also prove you have at least £10,000 in working capita (ehm, shit!) There are also loads of other reasons why companies wants to keep everything within one domain (costs being another).

Therefore we had to try to think of something that would help Google understand that we were targeting several different countries within one domain. In essence what we came up with was very simple, uploading seperate XML sitemaps for each geographic content and setting the Geo targetting in Google Webmaster Tools to the specific country. This will only work on a TLD that is non geo specific, ie: .COM, .ORG, .INFO and so on, you can not use the below method for Geo TLDs like .co.uk or .de. Here’s the step by step instructions:

1. Create separate XML sitemaps for each country specific content. For example samplewebsite.com/FR/ and all pages within that folder was in one XML sitemap (for example samplewebsite.com/FR/sitemap_FR.xml ) You will need a xml sitemap generator where you can specify folders to include. Then you create another XML sitemap for all the pages within then samplewebsite.com/NL/ and so on..

2. In Google Webmaster Tools click “add a site” and insert the specific URL including the folder, i.e samplewebsite.com/FR/

3. Next you verify the ownership either by a meta tag or html file

4. Once the site has been verified you go into the main “Home” area of webmaster tools, and click on the site you have just added.

5. Once you are within the dashboard clik on “Site Configuration” then “Sitemaps”. Now add the URL of the geo specific XML sitemap in the box. i.e samplewebsite.com/FR/sitemap_FR.xml just add sitemap_FR.xml.

6. Once the sitemap is uploaded comes geo targeting. Back into the dashboard for that “site”, click on “Site Configuration” then “Settings”, like this:

7. Within “Settings” you will get the drop down menu for “Geographic target” where you will be able to select the specific target country for that sitemap.

Et volla, Geo targeting on the same domain! Repeat all the steps for each specific language folder, ie samplewebsite.com/DE/ samplewebsite.com/NL and so on. Make sure that you add a “new site” in the main Home Area for each country specific folder. I know that seems a bit weird, especially as you probably already have the main samplewebsite.com already on there, but you have to include each one as a seperate site.

I would also like to add that I did run the above technique past a Google engineer before I did it, and they had no objections, so be reassured there is nothing even slightly grey about this method. At the moment my own company and a few other SEO friends of mine are testing it out, but please feel free to try it and let me know how it goes. Happy webmaster tools fiddling

The insertion of a link from Google search suggest list in the search box directly to a website has been on then off then on again and quickly off again. I took a screen shot and lost it but one day in early November while being lazy and going to Google to get to Webmaster Tools, I noted when I got as far as “Webm” I was offered a direct link to “Web MD” in the search suggest box.  This was switched off before the end of the day I believe and life went on as normal though I was surprised the normally US-only site was coming up.  I later learned Boots had partnered with Web MD so that would be a huge bonus to Boots.

The screen shot I took and the reason it stood out to me was because of the implications here for paid search.  No longer was I even completing my search phrase before being offered a URL link to go directly to my destination (in this case, the wrong one).  If a searcher doesn’t even see the search results, how are they going to be exposed to advertising?  How will affiliates work in a space with direct-to-URL search suggestions?  While it seemed to be only for a few searches, it was not just brand searches which were getting suggestions.

This is, of course, nothing new to those folks using Google.com and in fact, a test with Google.com shows what this might look like in the UK if it is ever rolled out for good (or longer than a few hours).  Danny Sullivan back in December 2008, a full year before we saw this here in the UK, found it in the US with not just URL suggestions but news and paid search ads.  At the moment, it seems to only work for clearly intentional brand searches like Godiva but not Ghirardelli (which is just plain wrong – Ghirardelli chocolate is clearly deserving as it is yummy chocolate).  This could be as a result of testing and the same concerns I have which I assume are shared by some of the engineers – or at least sales.

I maintain now, as I did last year, that this is a game changing move if it proceeds as it was.  It would strengthen known brands, harm affiliates and new brands, and make life generally more difficult.  By directing people away from the SERPs, it stops all sorts of brand exposure for smaller players.

While it does not seem to direct searchers away from the SERPs yet, a possible alternative to this implementation would be, as was demonstrated to Danny, paid results in search suggest.  How to establish the authoritative paid search result, the cost and the demand for this by brands and non-brands alike would be difficult to manage.  I’m excited by the ever-changing nature of the SERPs – their chocolate SERPs need work though

It’s Hallowe’en and by looking back, I see my blog posts take a religious bent at this time of the year.   Not that I’m at all religious!  My Seven Deadly Sins of SEO blog post probably dispels that notion.  Last year I asked if Google was becoming a modern day God – and a scary one at that.  No, I have nothing in here about killing SEOs  The title is just to grab your attention.  SRSLY – you should love your SEO.

There are times when I have considered the possibility that sacrificing a goat to the Google god might be more effective than trying to do SEO.  After all, sometimes it seems so random. Why so I continue to get spam in organic results?  Why does this search result Dave called out at A4U have Aussie results in it ?  Should I only dine out in South Africa?  But it is not all bad news – the big G is opening up more and more dialogue so as you read this blog post, remember it’s not all doom and gloom.

Google has, for some time, seemingly operated under the false impression that by focusing on doing no evil, it can do no wrong.  By gaining a market dominant position, they may feel that they can focus more on delivering quality search results and less on marketing and perhaps “doing good”.  But what happens when that switch gets pressed, a new algorithm goes live and a small business suddenly finds itself buried and in ruins?

Google recently made changes through “update Vince” to its algorithm giving a bonus to trusted brands.  This can effectively mean that launching a new brand becomes next to impossible without huge marketing and PR budgets with which to buy links through offers, editorial links and the like.  Even with paid links, the new brand is less likely to succeed because of the tweaks Google regularly gives its search results, no matter how much quality they offer.  As I mentioned last year, Google has become a modern god and it seems to be a scary one.  I always think of Yahoo more as a Goddess of search, Bing as a little demi-god aspiring to full godhood and Ask as the forgotten deity of a lost people.

In the UK with a market dominant position looking at 90% of all search traffic coming through it, Google has become THE vehicle for business.  Ranking well is essential for a business and if that means paying to get in to the search results, they will.  But what happens if you don’t have a large marketing budget and a specialist firm behind you and just struggle along?  You get your PPC account yanked by Google.  As many ancient cultures learned, you may not understand why you angered the gods but once angered, there is no chance to beg for forgiveness – you are simply struck down.  Some days even Job looks like he had it easy compared to small businesses in search.

Even when the chosen one, god’s Google’s disciple on Earth speaks, even then we do not always get true guidance.  When examined, Donna revealed how “Listening To Matt Cutts Is A Bad Idea”  We struggle on and as more and more prophets of the one true Google emerge, the picture gets even murkier.  How can a small business survive without a guide through this strange land of misleading information?

As small and medium businesses struggle to rank well for things they hold stock of and should be authoritative for, they all cry out the same thing ‘just tell us what we are doing wrong’ and Google, in its benevolence created the bible Webmaster Guidelines.  Transgressions of these guidelines are punishable by being smote by the one true Google but not all transgressions are recorded in the book.

When even fixing on–page SEO causes trouble it may feel like there’s no way to win – but you can just by reading, staying informed and just taking time  and reading up on how-to.  There will be more of those in the coming months so keep coming back!

Yes, this blog post has nothing to do with the title.  Don’t be afraid of Google.  They may be able to ruin your business though so understand their guidelines through Webmaster Guidelines.  Register your site in Google Webmaster Tools (free!), add Google Analytics and read up about SEO.  We’ll keep blogging because we’re here to help!

Look, we all hated the dark days when Google was uber-secretive about everything, and we cheered up when first “Googleguy” and then Matt Cutts (aka Googleguy) started giving us a few glimpses of veiled instructions. Later Matt began to give exact instructions for things that were on Google’s agenda. In other words, if Google wanted to control our actions, Matt pulled our little puppet strings and gave us specific instructions.

Two examples?

1. He specifically told us to either use nofollow or javascript for paid links so that we wouldn’t pass link juice through.
2. He specifically told us that nofollowing our own internal links would be a good way to sculpt our link juice so that it flowed where we wanted it to.

Now? Both of those specific instructions are null and void. If you followed some of those directions, you now have to start over. Why?

1. At the Google I/O conference recently, Vanessa Fox learned that Google can now understand more Javascript and that those links pass both anchor text and PageRank. Uh-oh. If you followed Matt’s instructions and used javascript on your paid links, you now have to go back and change them all – AGAIN – now that Google has changed things on their end.
2. At SMX today, Matt Cutts basically let everyone know that PageRank sculpting is now dead. He said “Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed. There’s this assumption that that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore (your leftover PageRank will now “evaporate”). So now, all that work you did to sculpt your PR throughout your site, which Matt earlier suggested was a good idea, is work that is down the drain.

See folks, Google used to tell us that we should design for our users and NOT for the search engines. But then, they realized that they could manipulate us by giving us nuggets of info that we would chew like cows chew cuds, so they did. Unfortunately, that ends up hurting us in the end when they change their tactics every few months, and it may end up hurting our users as well, as we keep jumping every time we’re told to jump by the mighty G.

I think we all have enough information now that we can make wise decisions on our own. I think I’d rather go back to the dark, secretive days before our puppet strings were being pulled. At least then we’d be pulling our own strings rather than being manipulated like a bunch of muppets.

Matt, I appreciate the efforts and all, but I think maybe I’ll just go back to making decisions based on what my user needs. They are less likely to change their minds than Google is.

There’s nothing new about this post. It’s been said before. But for those who still confuse ethics with believing whatever line of bull the search engines might be throwing out for their own betterment, I wanted to just put out a little reminder on this fine April day.

One definition of a hypocrite, according to dictionary.com, is:

a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, esp. one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.

Google’s stance on paid links:

…link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext…when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”

And yet, Google has NO PROBLEM profiting off of this very thing, as you can see by the screenshots I took for a search for [sell links].

Like I said, nothing new here. We’ve all seen this before, but I like to serve a reminder now and then, that Google does what is in the best interest of Google’s bottom line, so keep that in mind the next time you kneel down at the altar of Goog. Just sayin’…

The other night I was at a fantastic event at La Cave au Fromage which I highly recommend for corporate events. Introductions were made, wine consumed and conversation flowed. We got on to the topic of Google and someone made the assertion that Google “steals the last click”. So knowing the affiliate market as I do, I countered with “and the first click and the middle click and really anywhere that people use a paid ad in their journey.”

The gentleman who was arguing that Google was taking credit for that last click countered that Google was trading off others hard work.  For example, he said, Renault work hard making an advert about their new Clio car only for Google to force them to use paid advertising and stealing money as people go to Google to get more information about the new car.  Thus, since Google is stealing money from business, they are making money only because other people do the hard work for them.   Google thus was some sort of leech, draining money without making any effort. Well, even leeches make a bit of an effort and took thousands of evolutionary years to arrive at where they are.

Back when I started doing this SEO malarkey, the world was a different place. I’d been online for 10 years and in the previous 2 had heard more and more reference to something called “mosaic” and something about pages. You could see things on these pages! Unfortunately as someone who used raw telnet on a light computer this just was not possible but the online world was magnificent even without images.

Very quickly things changed and Windows 3.51 entered in to my life and the world got graphical. Google wasn’t around in 1996 but plenty of others were and many evolved in to the space with aggregators like Web Ferret and Dogpile bringing us a wider selection of search results. It was through Dogpile that I remember Google standing out. The results included actual on page text – a revolution!

What followed was a slow growth stage, then a heavy branding and marketing phase and now when certain parts of the world talk about wanting to find something online, they talk about “Googling” it. This came after only substantial marketing and technology efforts and the work that Google put in to their product should not be lightly dismissed.

Google did not simply form itself out of whole cloth and land a finished entity which cost nothing to develop and deploy – there’s millions behind this endeavour. It is able to make millions from its advertising platform because of the combined brand awareness and human nature.

I’m the first to admit to a love/hate relationship with Google. I miss the old keyword-stuffing days when it was easy to rank for anything. I’ll also be the first to admit Google is an effective monopoly in the UK and I think something has to be done. That does not make Google thieves, leeches, or sponges. They worked to become dominant and while I hope it goes the way of IM or Microsoft, we are where we are at the moment.

Google is not stealing money – they are not trading on the back of someone else’s hard work.  They are a dominant brand like Coca-Cola, Marlboro, and others.  Make the most of traffic they drive to your page by whatever route and get that conversion first time. Don’t blame Google for managing to win in a sector, learn to utilise them as a tool.

(rant over!)