How Google Ruined Online Marketing

You cannot deny the fact that Google is the biggest and most popular search engine in the world. Because of this reason, Google remains the largest influencer of online marketing. With its massive coverage, it has been able to dictate how the online trends will go.

Being an authority and dominant in online marketing comes with its own fair share of negatives. Google has ruined online marketing by imposing its tools on the users. Tools like Google analytics have for many years been the main source of data that organizations and businesses depend on to create their online marketing strategies.

Google analytics has created confusion in the digital marketing world by misrepresenting marketing strategies, marketing channels, and marketing content. This confusion has led marketers to realize less than intended results for their online marketing efforts.

It is ironic that Google was a product of an open-source movement. And was at some time one of the top organizations pushing for a free web. The search giant, whose slogan was once “Don’t Be Evil” has turned out to be very different lately.

Actually, I know I’m not alone in this, Google and a select few other search engine superpowers are running online marketing. The monopoly that Google has enjoyed over the years had put it in the supervisory position of all the content on the web to an extent of derailing the efforts of digital marketers and users alike.

What was it with Google Page Rank (PR) System?

Google ruined online marketing a long time ago. Right from the introduction of the Page Rank system, which has since been removed. It was a lousy way of ranking websites, which ended up costing businesses and organizations millions of dollars in SEO efforts to optimize for a position (Page rank) that doesn’t matter.

Google unwittingly developed the linking economy which saturated the web with spam through its classification of pages based on the number of links going into and out of the pages. The algorithms were that of a democratic system where links were a vote for the quality of your website. All you need to do was to tuck your links in some shoddy website and distribute it all over the web and you are good to go. This was a failure for Google, and it ruined the online marketing efforts for digital marketers.

Why put Ads first?

One of the features of Google that I hate so much, and so do most markers, is the fact that it hides the results from you until you see or click the Ads that have been ranked on top of the SERPs. A good thing for the advertisers but a bad user experience for the user, who just wanted to see the results that they were searching for.

This move by Google is click-baity and a turn-off for SEO experts, but since Google has a monopoly with the largest market share amongst all the search engines, they can get away with it. Online marketers will now be forced to optimize their strategies to fit in.