Belgium court rules against Google.

The Belgium court's ruling against Google may be the most absurd judgment I have ever heard, and it clearly shows how incompetent and clueless that judges and lawyers are when it comes to the Internet.

The newspapers who brought the lawsuit are equally clueless, since they obviously have no idea why they are losing sales, and are hoping to improve their sales by stopping Google from giving them free links.

Yes, Google has been giving them free links and sending visitors to their web sites for free for years. The fact that these newspapers have not figured out how to turn these free visitors into paying customers is the ultimate irony. To say that this is a frivolous lawsuit is elevating the case to an insane level of absurdity.

First of all, it's not just Google - every search engine is sending them free visitors.

Second, they are getting free visitors!!! That's right - FREE visitors!

Want to see your sales drop even further? It's really simple. Just ask the search engines to drop you from their index. You don't even need to sue them. They will drop you in an instant, and all you need to do is ask.

What are they thinking? I can only imagine some really old Belgian dudes sitting around and complaining that their newspaper sales are dropping, so they look for somebody to blame, rather than looking in the mirror or taking a close look at what is happening in the world today. So, rather than hiring somebody who knows how the Internet works and what they need to do to compete, they hire a lawyer to obfuscate the situation in front of some judge, and they get him to rule against Google.

They even got Google to post the ruling on the home page of google.be for only 5 days. So, if you blinked - you missed it - but it was there. I'm sure the lawyers are happy (they got paid) and the newspaper owners are smugly proud that they won the case.

But, what are they thinking? All this proves is that Belgium is still living in the dark ages. I'm sure that all of the scribes living when Gutenberg started printing were upset about the new printing press technology that was putting them out of business. Did any of their protests change anything?

OK, so here is a practical solution for ALL of the search engines (Google is not alone in this): Why not actually use the robot tools that already exists?

The META tag for robots (meta name="robots" content="index,follow") has been redundant for many years now, because that's exactly what robots do. They find an index page, and then they follow all the links on it.

The same is true of the robots.txt file. If it does not exist, the robots freely do exactly what is in the meta tag above. But there is no reason to have either one appear anywhere in your website today. When both are missing, the robots are free to crawl your site and index it as they please, which has been going on since the Internet was first introduced.

So, why not require (opt-in) that the robots.txt file be present, or leave the site alone? Follow the rules in the robots.txt file, and if somebody tells you that it is OK to index their entire site, fine. Then, follow any rules that are found in the robots meta tag. Otherwise - leave without doing anything, and the pages in the site will eventually drop out of the index.

Sure, it will cause grief for a while for some older sites who do not know about the change, but at least it will stop frivolous lawsuits like this one...

Yahoo's CEO doesn't get search at all...

I saw the CEO of Yahoo last night in an interview on a PBS TV station. When asked about search, he commented that search was just search, and the results were all the same anyway, so it doesn't matter which search engine you use.

The only reason for Google's success was that they did a better job at "monetizing" their results, so they made more money. He mentioned this several times, and the implication is that Yahoo just needs to do a better job at monetizing their search results, and they will gain more market share.

This makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

Granted, Google does a better job at monetizing, but I don't use Google because they do a better job at making money off their results. I use Google to find something, and their results have always been more relevant, so I spend a lot less time looking for what I want to find.

Danny Sullivan ( http://daggle.com/ ) has a very interesting blog note about how boring search is, and that most search engines are providing the "DOS Of Search" interface in their search results pages. http://daggle.com/060919-204304.html

This is true, and it would be nice to see some revolutionary new approach to delivering the SERPs, but I just want to find something quickly. I don't want to waste my time hunting around for stuff. I do enough of that in my office when somebody moves things around on me (I won't mention any names here because I'm already in enough trouble). I don't need fancy graphics or a "cool" new interface, and I especially don't want to waste my precious time looking for things. I just want to find things quickly, and any interface that slows me down is going to make me switch to a different search engine.

My point is that Yahoo's CEO doesn't get search at all. Google is NOT more successful because they do a better job at monetizing their results. They are more successful because they save people precious time, and if they ever lose sight of that, they will lose their market share to their competition.

Danny Sullivan and Search Engine Watch

I paid for membership to the Search Engine Watch web site this year, after meeting Danny Sullivan at SES NYC 06. It was a very brief meeting, but it was long enough for me to realize that he is a wonderful person in every regard.

Nobody from Incisive Media met with me, or talked to me, and I had no idea that they were even involved. I also went to the Pubcon in Boston a few months later, and even though I sat in the front row at every session and watched as Brett Tabke bounced a ball a few inches from my feet, I was completely ignored.

It was right after the Pubcon conference that I paid for my membership at Search Engine Watch, and it was Danny's gracious welcome and treatment of me that made that decision easy. I have been lurking and reading articles at Danny's site for almost ten years, and it has been a tremendous help to me because I have learned a great deal about SEO and SEM there. I also started posting comments in the SEW forum to help other webmasters as a way of giving something back to Danny and the community that he has built up there.

At the same time, I stopped posting on Brett's WMW forum. It was the difference in personalities that made me switch - not some corporate entity that convinced me to pay up to become a "member." It was Danny, not Incisive, that made me decide to put my hard earned cash and extra time into SEW.

Now, I'm not sure what to do, and I haven't posted on any forum since I saw Danny's resignation announcement. My only posting was in a poll that Danny started on SEW. I see tons of postings pleading for help, and I know that I can quickly find solutions to their SEO / SEM problems, but something about the whole situation makes me uncomfortable.

I know that there are lots of really wonderful people who are part of the SEW forums, and that Danny continues to post there, but there is just something that stops me every time I hit the reply button. I also know of many situations in the search engine world that are begging to be brought up in a public forum so the search engines themselves will take notice and fix things to make it a much better web for all of us.

So, should I find another forum, or continue at SEW?

Which PPC search engine wants money?

I recently took over a $50,000 per month PPC advertising campaign for a client, which is spread across the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN). I sent an email to the Google Adwords rep, who replied right away and immediately made some changes that I requested. I sent a second email to the Yahoo! Rep, but still have heard nothing back yet. MSN has no way to contact anybody, so I am on my own out here when there is a problem.

Hmmm... Google has about 50% of the market share in search, and they responded right away. Yahoo! only has about 22% of the market, and they have yet to respond to a paying client. MSN has slipped in the past year from about 14% down to about 10%, and there is no way to contact anybody when there is a problem (other than complaining on a public forum).

When I look at the conversion rates, I see the same ratio on each engine, so it would be easy to put all of that money into advertising on one search engine without affecting the bottom line, which is revenue.

So, which search engine should I spend $50,000 per month with?