Google Corruption

By Adam  |  22 Jan 2016 12:00:00

Google is the search engine that almost everybody uses. The fact that "Google" has entered English vocabulary as a verb is a very clear example of that. Google is, after all, an extremely helpful tool that helps us to find the things we're looking for online. But the problem is, while Google is free to use for everyone, they are keen to make as much money as possible from businesses. Google AdWords is a great way to advertise your business, but it is very expensive and not many people will be able to afford it. You may think that you could just use other means to advertise yourself and increase your search engine ranking, but unfortunately, Google try to stop this.

You see, for an independent eCommerce business, it might be a fairly standard idea to send a blogger or vlogger some free stuff so that they could then produce some content about what they thought of it. The problem is that if Google finds out about this you will be blacklisted and your ranking will be damaged. Even though this method seems nice, fair and legitimate, Google do not allow it as they want people to use Google AdWords instead. If you can afford to use Google AdWords, by all means do so and I hope it will work out, but if you can't afford it then my advice is to do things like that anyway, but just making sure to keep quiet about it. If you sent some clothes to a blogger who then wrote "Thanks for the free clothes from the good people at www.[whatever your site is called].com" Google would see that and you'd be punished, but if you made it clear to the blogger that you need to keep quiet about that, then they would probably understand.

The rule of Google is that you are not allowed to pay people to link back to your site - it seems to make sense in some ways, but it also seems to very much force people towards Google AdWords if they want to promote their websites. Bear this in mind as you try to promote your own eCommerce website, so that you can do so without suffering any unfair penalties. Whatever you decide to do, I hope it will go well for you.