I don't have the specifics of your example, but do keep in mind that big brands tend to be people's favorite brands [morningconsult.com].

Google has nothing to gain from promoting specific brands other than that it's what their users want to find, and the helps them.

Calling that prostitution is quite a stretch.

big brands tend to be people's favorite brands

... because that's all they know, because that's all Google shows them.

... because that's all they know, because that's all Google shows them.

Heh. Google wishes it was that powerful and omnipresent. People have no trouble finding Walmart or Amazon without Google, and those companies definitely don't owe their brand popularity to Google. Walmart spending nearly 4 billion dollars a year on advertising might have something to do with it.

Does Google reinforce that popularity? Yes, of course.

Some of this is the big fish eat the smaller fish. :(

On the other hand these giants don't really have narrow niches, only "products", so some of us still survive by having "something else."

My niche does not compete with the big guys, and they can't compete with me. ONLY problem is they suck up so much of the top of serps that traffic is missed because of the noise.

@robzilla i have a screenshot to show you if interested, but how to show you?

@ROBZILLA no its not. Google always prostitutes' for Big Brand.

I had a site delisted off Google for one month because of hidden text for shareware software on one inner page. WE fixed it immediately.. The exact same time, BMW got banned (read Matt Cutts blog about it) for sophisticated cloaking spamming google. BMW fixed it and were back live in Google in one week. While my very small business was shut down for a month..

I'm afraid you've missed the whole point of what I wrote earlier:

keep in mind that big brands tend to be people's favorite brands [...] Google has nothing to gain from promoting specific brands other than that it's what their users want to find, and [that] helps them.

How many people do you think searched specifically for the brand name of your small business vs. BMW?

In other words, how much of an effect did your penalty have on Google's users vs. BMW's penalty?

Any time a major brand goes missing from the search results, that's a problem for Google. Not because the big brand will get angry with them, but because a significant number of their users are negatively affected. Particularly when it comes to popular so-called navigational queries like "Facebook" or "BMW" or "Amazon", where people are just using Google to "navigate" to those websites, as opposed to more general queries where different brands compete like "electric sedan" or "toys", i.e. where users' queries can still be satisfied by other brands.

Still, of course BMW had to be penalized until they were no longer in violation. You can't have double standards there.

Lifting the penalty of BMW much faster than that of your small business was not a double standard, it was a matter of priorities; every day that the BMW website could not be found, many users were having a poor experience, so it made sense for Google to act quickly. A small business affected by a similar penalty, on the other hand, would probably be part of the long tail of penalized sites that individually just don't have as much of an impact on Google's users. This was 16 years ago and they eventually did away with the reinclusion requests, presumably because they obviously didn't scale very well.

When you accuse Google of "prostituting for big brands", you're suggesting that big brands essentially control Google, and so missing or ignoring a very important piece of the puzzle: Google's primary focus is on pleasing their users. The users don't know it, but collectively they are in control. Google doesn't care about big brands because they're big brands, they care about big brands because, as I wrote earlier, "big brands tend to be people's favorite brands".

Big brands don't steer Google, users do. It's an important distinction that I hope you'll keep in mind.

Of course, brands do influence those users, but that's a different matter.

Their search is more broken than ever. I keep getting results remotely similar to my search string but not related, pointing to sites that they are favouring.

BMW fixed it and were back live in Google in one week. While my very small business was shut down for a month..

Each site is given a refresh rate by Search engines (how often to crawl, calculate ranking, indexing speed etc...).

An important site, has a higher refresh rate, and changes are applied faster.

This is not shocking me that BMW is more important than your site, or mine.

@dimitri - perhaps you should read my comment about a site being delisted.. its got nothing to do with refresh rate. It was a case in the point that was there was a 30 day ban if you spammed google and you would file a reinclusion request to get back into the index after 30 days.. Google showed favoritism to the brand name and kept the penalty on the smaller business..

IIRC a reinclusion request was a chance to have a penalty lifted before the period of time associated with that penalty would expire (it could be 30 days but it depended on the violation). Most penalties would automatically expire and lead to reinclusion once Googlebot had confirmed that the site no longer violated the guidelines (that part did depend somewhat on "refresh rate") and the penalty period had passed.

Obviously they would be constantly bombarded with reinclusion requests. I'm not sure if they did, but it would make sense to sort those by user impact. As explained, that's not necessarily "favoritism to the [big] brand name", it's in service to their users. But clearly it does help to be influential. In this case it was, of course, also a bit of a public scandal and BMW was made an example of what not to do (thus helping to reduce that sort of stuff on the web) -- here we are still talking about it! -- so maybe they made some sort of an exception there and expedited things a little, who knows.

Search must be broken... I created a new website a couple of weeks ago and have a simple landing page with title and logo only. It has not been submitted to any search engines and I have not used Chrome to visit the website. Site is not using HTTPS, has no meta-tags at all and domain age is 2 weeks.

Yet it is #2 in search of 9,300 records!

I suppose it will start dropping when I start building backlinks and add some keyword rich content.

Second time you've posted that Search is "broken" but what you're describing is not really relevant here. Best to use the "Observations" thread [webmasterworld.com], alias "the dump", for random complaints about Google Search.

Search must be broken...

Not for g! Earnings are up, marketplace is expanded, advertising on the rise...

Maybe expectations are what is broken?

Currently still free to play, but costs money if next level success and growth are desired.

Just sayin'----

Just sayin', yeah -- and again, not relevant in this thread. Every Google thread quickly goes off the rails with these random and unhelpful complaints.

Use the "Observations" thread [webmasterworld.com] for that sort of general stuff so we can all choose to ignore it (it's just venting after all) and maintain at least some focus in other threads.

Every Google thread quickly goes off the rails

Well, since g is everywhere and all here depend on it, that makes sense! :)

</wry observation>

It really doesn't, even if you're joking. There's a reason there are threads, it's not one big Google chatroom, yet many of you treat it as such.