How Search Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing By Kevin J. Delaney
Some entrepreneurs have built thriving businesses largely by getting search engines such as Google Inc.'s to direct customers to their Web sites. But what happens when the search engines suddenly start pointing consumers somewhere else?
That is a possibility with which Topix.net Chief Executive Rich Skrenta is struggling this month. The news site, which is majority owned by media giants Gannett Co., McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co., paid a Canadian company $1 million for the Web address Topix.com in January. Mr. Skrenta intends to switch his site over to the more popular .com Web address from .net soon to help eliminate confusion and increase credibility with consumers.
Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine -- and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed "Anna Nicole Smith news" into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.
Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10%, that would essentially be a 10% loss in ad revenue, Mr. Skrenta says. "Because of this little mechanical issue, it could be a catastrophe for us," he says.
Further frustrating him is that Google's response to Topix's plea for help was an email recommending that, if the switchover were to go badly, the company should post a message on an online user-support forum; a Google engineer might come along to help out. "This can't be the process," Mr. Skrenta says. "You're cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business."
He's among a growing group of businesspeople whose fortunes are buffeted or burnished by the invisible, constantly evolving mathematical formulas at the heart of Web search engines. The influence of search engines has only grown in recent years, as they have become the de facto gateways for many of the more than 180 million American Internet users to anything they might do online.They also have become a crucial tool for businesses that depend on those users finding them.
But as a way to lure customers to a site, search rankings often aren't dependable. Overnight, sites can disappear from top results for any given search term -- say, "Miami hotels" -- and cause the sites' revenues plummet as potential customers go elsewhere.
Among the most common reasons for unpredictable changes in rankings are frequent updates to search engines' algorithms. These mathematical formulas analyze billions of Web pages for dozens of factors, such as the most prominent words on the pages and what other sites link to the pages, in order to determine how to rank them for relevance to a query. Search companies change algorithms partly to frustrate people who try to inappropriately boost their sites in the results, but legitimate businesses sometimes feel they're caught in the crossfire.
Google, of Mountain View, Calif., says it offers online tools for companies to get the best, most consistent, treatment from its search engine. It also counsels that sites shouldn't become overly reliant on traffic from searches and should find other ways to get visitors, such as by setting up user forums. "We have to keep improving our algorithms and giving the best search results," says Google software engineer Matt Cutts. "We can't promise that if you're No. 1 today, you'll be No. 1 tomorrow."
The importance of appearing at the top of the results is undisputed. A JupiterResearch study sponsored by search marketing firm iProspect concluded last year that 62% of search-engine users generally clicked on a link to a site on the first page of results. That has fueled the emergence of an industry of search-engine "optimization" specialists who help businesses try to find ways for their sites to rise in the rankings, such as using more-explanitory page titles.
Companies always have the option of paying for the search advertisements that usually appear above and alongside the search-engine results, but non-advertising results can be more significant. JupiterResearch estimates that when consumers are looking for products and services, they click on non-advertising results almost 80% of the time.
