Robert Seidman guest-blogs on social media guru Louis Gray’s blog on the topic of how the Goog has made the playing field of web publishing much more accessible for anyone (rather than just an arena for A-Listers):
louisgray.com: Google Has Leveled the Internet Playing Field: ”
I know a lot in the tech blogging circles will opine on whether Google is good or evil. For now in my mind, Google is still good. It leveled the playing field for us. We have little in the way of expense overhead (almost $0, really) and sure, it may work out that I’ve made about eight cents per hour, but that’s the subject for another blog post. From my perspective, we are allowed to compete, and compete fairly without spending anything on marketing. It’s hard for me to find fault with a system that provides that sort of level playing field.Organic Google search (including Google News) is our number one traffic source. This leads to a lot of referral traffic from other sites and a good bit of the direct traffic.”
The question of whether or not Google is “evil” or not is about as subjective as any subject you can imagine. For all of its occasional (or sustained) “big-brotherness,” Google does allow for a plethora of voices on topics. The key to ranking well in Google is not to rely too heavily on the mysticism of SEO, but to make good (and easily discoverable) content.