I read a certain amount of entitlement in TFA too. Like "I deserve to have my site on the front page of Google, rather than its paid advertisers or its own pages".
Why? This isn't a government-provided public service. It's a commercial product. Why should they direct traffic to your site for free? They, like everyone else, walk the line between providing an excellent product for customers and creating revenue for shareholders.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Google since they stopped not being evil. But I'm not sure that having a competing set of search engines would solve the author's problem - they would be writing passionate blog posts about "why can't we have a single set of SEO rules so I can get my site to the front page of all of them with no hassle?"
Worth noting that many times, the complaint is that the query is answered by an infobox... and the info in that box is provided by a website... and that website is the one complaining about a lack of clicks, because now people just use Google's scraped answers instead of actually visiting the site.
It seems valid to complain that Google is profiting off of a site while simultaneously harming that site's visibility.
> It seems valid to complain that Google is profiting off of a site while simultaneously harming that site's visibility.
I don't understand how Google is "harming the site's visibility" - it still gets some traffic free of charge from Google, right? If Google didn't list the site in the first place, it would be less visible and get less traffic. So I don't understand how Google is harming the site's visibility? Why does Google have an implied responsibility to send all possible traffic to a site it lists?
The entitlement may be sourced to the fact that the author is an SEO company.
As a sidebar... SEO companies would love to see Google knocked out of its current market position. Google has gotten very good at relying on signal that SEO companies can't control. They would much prefer a more gamable engine take Google's position from it.
We've seen this play out with the browser wars, though - different standards mean that each target needs a different approach. You'd end up having to create a different site with different content organisation for each search engine and then serve the right site to the right crawler.
It might be more gamable, but the competition isn't the search engine, or normal people posting normal non-gamed content, but other SEO teams. If everyone can game it, then it's a race to the bottom to see who can game it most/best and that's not a good place for anyone else.
Why? This isn't a government-provided public service. It's a commercial product. Why should they direct traffic to your site for free? They, like everyone else, walk the line between providing an excellent product for customers and creating revenue for shareholders.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Google since they stopped not being evil. But I'm not sure that having a competing set of search engines would solve the author's problem - they would be writing passionate blog posts about "why can't we have a single set of SEO rules so I can get my site to the front page of all of them with no hassle?"