Search Rankings

Posted by admin on January 1, 1970

Although most businesses would agree that their Internet search rankings within their business category are important, few do anything to protect them. Most businesses don’t even track their rankings very effectively. If you went to a business, large or small, and asked who had the responsibility to conduct regular generic Web searches on Google and Yahoo to keep track of the company’s search rankings, I’d expect you’d see a lot of finger-pointing from the Web team to Marketing to Corporate Communications.

At a small business? It’s just another duty for a stressed-out owner. You need only to look at the millions of unclaimed local business listings on Google and Yahoo to answer that question.

I recently conducted a search for Variable Information Printing software on Google. This expensive software is sold by large companies like Xerox and HP. The search listing returns showed multiple listings for a free shareware product, that was being sold by a legion of different “Black Hat” Web sites for $125. These spam sites crowded out the major competitors from the top listings. XMPIE, sold by Xerox, was the 80th return.

Yahoo, however, showed completely different results with Xerox as the first search return.

I’m sure at some point, someone at these major companies will notice this, and complain to Google, but not until weeks, perhaps months, have gone by. I wonder whose job it was to keep track of this? I bet it was someone in marketing, or maybe some guy on the Web team…