Held Ransom By Google PageRank
Google’s black-box policy toward how it’s algorithms work presents a major challenge to legitimate businesses that are contemplating name changes, site redesigns or other adjustments to their URL structure. From Techdirt:
“Decisions such as name changes or shifts from .net to .com domains are being influenced by how they’ll effect search results, with many companies frustrated with the feeling of being held ransom by their Google rank or other factors. This frustration grows when search companies aren’t particularly helpful to businesses making legitimate changes, preferring to let their algorithms, which often ignore certain kinds of behavior because they signal fraud or other funny business, handle everything. While it’s certainly well within the rights of a company like Google to tinker with its algorithm, it and other search engines’ vast amount of influence over sites’ traffic and business could make many people feel they have some responsibility to make things a little easier for the legitimate companies that aren’t looking to scam the system.
Had a conversation with the author of a very popular blog on this topic just last week. He wants to move to a more flexible platform but is stuck with his pagerank pointed at a blogging service rather than an owned domain. He has some ideas about how to move but it could take a year to make the migration work right. He does not want to sacrifice pagerank as it drives his business.
Sad.
One day the “net neutrality” discussion will shift to “Google neutrality”!