I really appreciate alternative voices, not just because they go against the grain, but because it’s necessary to have opposition to expand perspectives. No point having a company or industry with a bunch of yes-men, you’ll never discover or fix problems. Take a read on one of my favorite ‘alternative perspective web marketing’ blogs on the topic of ‘Google Stealing Traffic‘.

Great read, and brings up a few questions that I want to muse about here.

The free market enterprise assumes a number of things including: 1) People are free to criticize Google (the industry giant) and come up with better ways to exceed them, 2) Google is free to create competitive advantages and make money off of them, 3) those who cannot innovate will be left by the wayside when ideas change.

Google has unrolled their Local services and search results that end up preying off of the very web sites that give them the information in the first place (and who are ironically following their rules).

Take a read of Micheal’s post linked above and you can see documentation of how Google is stealing traffic from web sites. When you type search parameters you are now receiving full information on results ranging from reviews to phone numbers. Really, no need to visit the web site at all if Google sums it up so well. Props to Google, unfortunately for the web site in questions they profit off of this move since they keep traffic that would otherwise head to your web site.

Some thoughts on the move: 1) Some web sites won’t care. Why? Because regardless of whether or not someone visited the web site, action took place. In his case, he still ended up visiting the restaurant and having a meal, the restaurant doesn’t care either way so long as they get the foot traffic. (I’m not going to discuss the implications this has on brand recognition which is a bigger deal.)

2) When reviews are present, and when they [Google] summarize other web sites that have gone through great lengths to create quality that content for reviews, searchers don’t visit the review web site because the information is available and consumable quickly in Google’s format.

That means a) the web sites that made the content and who followed Google’s rules (by making a nice content rich web site), lose profit from visitors usurped by Google who makes cash by keeping and targeting Google ads to those users, and b) the web sites, as a result of the free market enterprise, need to innovate beyond how they offer what is essentially a glorified directory.

Yes Google is profiting off of web sites with great content and they have a right to do so. It just means it’s time for the web sites being ‘preyed’ upon to kick the can or figure out a different way to attract visitors. It stinks, but such is the temporary life of the net.