Did Google Just Hurt Its Image?
by Ali Husayni, in News, on April 6, 2008
As read in our previous post “Matt Cutts Perfming SEO Work”, Google has recently purchased Double Click Performics, which is a SEO/PPC company. It announced yesterday that it is going to sell off the SEO part of the company (Performics):
“It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business,” said Tom Phillips, Google’s director of the integration of DoubleClick.
It appears as though Google has caved in under so much pressure from the outside world (especially SEO Bloggers) when it purchased Performics because of the conflict of interest it created. However, I have a different theory.
I believe Google and its executives are not so dumb to have not recognized this conflict from the get-go. However, they wanted Performics because of the amounts of money they could generate by performing SEO work. Imagine that most of the 500 fortune companies would have become Google’s SEO customers through Performics. And this would have generated lots of revenue for Performics and therefore for Google; so, why now announcing to sell it?
This is the interesting quote from this article:
“Google announced that the search engine had received ‘preliminary interest’ in the Performics division from a number of its existing partners.”
“…Its existing partners…” is what grabs my attention. So, what appears to be the case is that Google is going to sell Performics to someone who has a direct relationship with Google. This will allow Google to kill two birds with one stone: profit from signing many high-profile SEO companies and save its public image at the same time.
Do you think that would fly with the public? I don’t think so. Google needs to be responsible and stay away from shady maneuvers just to gain a few bucks more.
What do you think? We’d appreciate your comments.
3 Comments
posted April 6, 2008 at 6:36 am | Permalink
Idris Samawi Hamid says:
Hi,
Can you explain why this acquisition is not illegal? It seems that other SEO companies could launch a class-action anti-trust lawsuit to prevent Google from acquiring Performics. This is because their access to google technology would give them an unfair advantage.
I’m sure some lawyers would be interested in this…
I
posted April 6, 2008 at 10:10 am | Permalink
Mahdi says:
Very interesting point. There is no doubt that SEO would make tons of money if it’s done for huge companies. Google buying this company might have another reason beside what you mentioned Ali. It might be that Google wanted to explore some of the secrets involved in SEO and fight against it in their next Search Engine algorithm. What I’ve been recognizing recently is that when I search for a question I have no more the old forum answers pop up, the forum answers are mostly very new. Google search has got so strong that seems like their spiders are reading websites with speed of light. So they are changing for the better. Every day and it makes sense that they buy a big SEO company cause as you said it would make some money or it can be a big anti SEO research center!!!
posted April 6, 2008 at 11:07 pm | Permalink
Ali Husayni says:
The acquisition should have been illegal, but both the EU and the States responsible agencies approved it - it appears that Google got their approval before announcing it was going to purchase Performics.
The lawsuit sounds interesting; but now that Google wants to sell Performics, we should wait and see who will buy it. Even if Google makes a profit on this transaction, there should be a lawsuit filed; because just by owning Performics for a month, clients would assume that Performics has now insight into how Google works - even if this may not be true.
About your point Mahdi, Google has all the insight it needs into how SEO companies work. As a matter of fact, the equation is the other way around. It’s the SEO companies who want to know how Google works, because that’s how they have to optimize the sites to get good ranks. Also, Google can change its algorithm (as they have done several times in the past) in a short period of time. So, it doesn’t make sense for Google to be wary of the SEO companies.
One more thing: Google doesn’t mind white-hat (legal) SEO techniques. As a matter of fact, they encourage sites to use optimization techniques because that will help them rank websites easier.