Is Google hurting your online business?

There seems to be a big debate at the moment regarding if Google should be allowed to send itself traffic from its own search engine. For example if you do a search for “seo” for example you will see that Google is placing an ad to their site when people are searching for certain search terms. The debate at the moment especially for certain web based industries is should Google be allowed to do this and potentially take business and traffic away from my website. At the moment the European Commission is investing this matter along with some other anti trust matters that seem to be on peoples minds as well. This seems to be a tough debate and many people have mixed feelings about how ethical this practice is and if it is even legal. But as people know when it comes to technology such as software and the Internet there are some gray areas when it comes to the law.

I believe that this is a real tough call to make because you can argue both cases. Personally for me this isn’t good for my business because Google is combating SEO’s and Internet marketing companies because they themselves are competing in the same market. Being a SEO myself you can say that my company is directly competing with Google. Because we both profit from providing certain Internet marketing related services and or products. There is absolutely no way that my company or I’m assuming 98% of all of the other websites / Internet business can compete with them either. For example what I do is help you get your website to the top of a Google search. Google promotes ad space on the right hand side of their search engine called Pay Per Click. So essentially we both do the same exact thing which is giving website owners more exposure and traffic from their website by placing their website in strategic locations when a Google user is performing a search. Apparently Google gets over one billion searches a day, so if you were a website owner you would want as many of those daily Google users seeing and visiting your website.

In conclusion it is really up to certain people and or organizations to shed some light on this matter. Because Google basically has a monopoly 90%+ of all searches are done through their search engine there is no option or way for website owners to combat this issue. I think that Google will basically do what they want when they want it because they can. It is up to some Internet gurus to find a way to leverage the playing field. It is the ongoing war for Internet real estate battle because lets face it, just combine Googles, Facebooks and Microsofts annual revenue and you will see why. There is always hope and there is always something the little guys can do to find their place among the big companies because one business especially like Google, usually tends to open up other business opportunities. If Google wants to place their own ads n their website and hinder other websites in their search engine then they have to decide if that is going to impact their public perception and their bottom line.