Try Googling - Google phone number
I am a Google fan, after i first started using Google as a search engine back in 2000 i have wondered at their great search results and built businesses that rely heavily on being in those search results. Google Earth amazed me, i spent hours planning holidays and checking out friends houses using Street View – Did they really drive a car with mounted camera all over the world – WOW.
I can MSN chat with my in-laws by sneakingly using Google Translation, making them think i am learning Japanese, shhh OK, don’t tell. I use GMail to coordinate my email accounts and i use igoogle to organise my news feeds. So you can safely say i use Google a lot.
Now i know how Google make their money and its a staggering amount that they make, Google Adwords work and together with your Organic (unpaid for listings in Google) listings a business can establish a strong online presence through Google. Anyone who has worked online knows about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) the art of sculpting your website in a way that impresses Google. This is a huge industry in itself.
So, how much do we all rely on Google? A hell of a lot i guess.
Are they deserving of this much business and trust? Are they good at it? Do they provide good service?
Consider this: You run an online business, Google pushes about 4,000 visitors a day to your business, from that you convert 3% to sales and your average sale is $500. That’s about $60,000 sales a day. Thank you Google. One day you wake up and you are no longer listed on Google, GONE! Your business slows. What do you do? Head straight for Google and Google ‘Google Phone Number”….Bad luck, no such thing.
So, here is my point, who is Google, who represents Google to you, who in Google flipped a switch that excluded the website from Google?
I know that it is claimed that there is no human intervention in Google results, it is driven by huge machines and clever algorithms ONLY. So how would you go about getting your website back onto Google? If you run an online business i encourage you to stop and think about it. It can happen… What would YOU do?
The truth is that Google has little or no real representation in Australia, they have a sales office to boost Adword sales but they are detached totally from the nerve center in the US. The above scenario did happen, it was only resolved by someone who luckily new someone who knew someone at Google in the US. The matter could have taken weeks to resolve through official channels. The culprit? A piece of code in their website was not liked by Google, it automatically took the site offline – BANG – GONE – no phone call, no email, nothing!! We are all learning to accept this new way of doing business but i for one cannot believe that such a drastic decision by Google was not followed up by a human.
Google can make and break a business at flick of a switch – no questions asked – Is this RIGHT?
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I am the General Manager at CamerasDirect.com.au
Under the orange umbrella I also look after the PrinterCartridges & CameraTalk websites.
My Photography experience started in 2003/4 with a Nikon D70 passed onto me by my father. At first it was definitely the gadget that caught my attention. The art grew on me later. This passion mixed in with my Online Marketing and Web Development background will be the focus of my posts on CameraTalk.
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That screengrab has waaaaay too much irony in it.
Some lessons really sting to learn. I guess one needs to recognise their dependencies and all the risks associated with them. This is easier said than done, because not every business is large enough to have an IT department who are across all the ins and outs.
I’ve had the same thing happen to a friend of mine who ran a business selling high quality digeridoos. I built his first website (for the price of a didg). I used a simple formula for page layout and navigation (he supplied the colour scheme and pictures). His business went okay and he sold didges all around the world. I gave him some basic advice about keeping the document structure semantic and how that was important for staying on google. A few months later, I got a call from a rather distressed didg maker. He had his website redesigned by a professional designer and as he said “I disapeared off google over night”. His business may as well have done so too.
One could make the argument that risk mitigation could involve advertising through various other sources, but advertising costs money if for no other reason that it takes time to administer marking campaigns. However the problem is that the vast majority of people use google to find you whether you like it or not. As long as that is the reality, small businesses without IT departments are likely to be peasants in Google’s kingdom.
The IT revolution giveth, and the IT revolution taketh away.