The Search Engine Monopoly and Your Website.

Search Engines are likely the most important websites that exist on the internet. It's no coincidence that Google is a behemoth. Depending on where you get your information from, people use Google to find what they are looking for at an approximate 5-to-1 ratio compared to the next most frequently used search engine. That is power. Google especially, but all search engines influence the way we access and use the internet.

The problem with all roads going through search engines, from a business and marketing point of view, is that there is no oversight or code of ethics or published standard operating procedures they have to live by. Search Engines do what they want, what they decide is the best practice for their business. Their goals are the same as any other business: increase revenue, reduce costs, grow shareholder profits, etc. In short, make money. Those goals align with steady and reliable traffic, the same as any other website. If nobody uses a search engine, that search engine is not likely to exist for a very long time. What that means is that search engines are not likely to do anything so radical that they alienate or lose their users, and that is good news for the rest of us who depend on search engines to let the people of the world find our sites. But what that doesn't guarantee is that a search engine won't tweak a formula here or there that ranks search results sending your site from its comfortable spot on the 1st page to the no-man's-land of page 2 and beyond.

The point is, search engines are not public entites nor are they altruisitic. They do what they want, when they want, for whatever reason they want. Google has been known to 'delist' sites and, coversely, they can bump up sites they like, sites they feel deserve the exposure. There are no rules here beyond maintain users, maintain traffic, and the search eninges will continue to do that so long as they return relevant search results, regardless of what that means to your particular site. If your site goes away, drops off the top page, how many others do you think are out there waiting to take its place?

So don't get too comfortable. Be flexible and continue learning, because you never know when the search engine landscape is going to shift and you're going to have to stay balanced or everything you built is going to crumble down around you.