Competing with Google….

Q: How do you compete against a £6 billion company when you’ve got a marketing budget of £300

A: Go home for a wank instead.

I recently noted that Google’s first page SERPs are completely gamed in some markets by Google themselves. Search for ‘shoes’ and your common-or-garden organic SEO companies/legitimate businesses manage to bag all of 9 spots against up to 20 spots that Google now reserve for properties they own. There’s the now-obligatory YouTube results… some crappy news stories… 11 opportunities to click AdWords and Google Shopping results. Of those results, both Google Shopping and YouTube are, of course, riddled with Google advertising. So Google’s game plan for 2009 can basically be summed up as: “stay on Google, untermensch!”

It’s something that I only caught in retrospect having been to Google to see various shadowy internal figureheads (every one of them a ‘vice president of something’) talk about the future of the company. The keyword that came through most strongly was that Google is a ‘platform’.

Hold on one cotton-picking second. A platform? Since when?

Platforms: no good for feet, no good for the internet

A platform is a wildly different thing to a search engine. It is a publishing medium, a content owner and distributor – not a gateway to other things. Yet look at the evidence: Google Documents, Blogger, Google Books, Google Shopping, YouTube, Knol, Google News, Orkut, Gmail… all forming part of what is shaping up to be the biggest content platform yet seen.

Google should be wary. Since the dawn of web time, people have been down this route. Remember when Altavista stopped being a search engine and started being a ‘portal’ (of course you don’t – you’re only 12!) What about Yahoo! struggling under the weight of all the shit they’ve bought and/or developed down the years? Those are/were ‘platforms’. They tried to impose a version of the web with them at the very centre on the basis of driving revenue from captive eyes. Whether you call it a “platform” or a “portal”, it’s the same old shit.

My mobile company are still doing the same fucking thing. Sign up to 3, and you get access to ‘Planet 3′ – a collection of free content, like syndicated news and weather updates, allied to a load of ‘premium content’ and other stuff you have to pay to access. Do I use it? Hardly. I don’t want 3 determining where I go online (the fact that you pay £9 bazillion per Mb doesn’t exactly help, mind you). Google are wandering closer and closer to that line.

Google’s stated aim is “organizing the world’s information.” Sounds impressive, but if that ‘information’ is increasingly proprietary to Google where do we end up – a world in which “Google” and “the internet” are interchangeable?

No thanks.

Anyway – where does that all leave the humble SEO, trying to get his client up there on the first page for ‘hatstands’ or ‘onion seller’ or ‘brown underpants’? At the whim of a company prepared to flood the first page of their rankings with their own properties, plus the same old ‘noncommercial’ culprits like Wikipedia, University research papers and the BBC. So while there’s still value in SEO, that’s you’re putting yourself up against. Sure there’s niches aplenty, but don’t expect it to stay that way. Google want you to pay per click – of course they do! And guess what – they can make it happen. Domain doing well for that keyword niche? Just wait till there’s a Wikipedia article, or Google Books finds a chance correlation in a cookery book from 1887. God help you if brown underpants ever hit the news, because your rankings will be gone in a flash.

Google might make a big play about their engineers, but it’s the marketing guys and financiers calling the shots now. The commercial imperative has to be to keep visitor numbers up whilst squeezing the value out of organic SEO. Think you’ve got the brainpower or the might to outwit the PHDs and bank balance of Google. Good fucking luck!

I still love Google, and it’s the place I go to find what I want. But there’s a change in the air. 2009 will be extremely interesting. If Microsoft can break the habit of a lifetime and do something decent or if 3 guys in a garage somewhere have got something up their sleeve, I’ll be off like a shot.