Keep in mind that a lot of small businesses are on the internet too, whose owners often don't understand how all this stuff works, and have just hired an SEO consultant or two in the past to help improve their Google search ranking, with no ill intentions other than trying to get more visibility and improve business. My parents are two of these people actually, and changing the rules all of a sudden like Google did, with no warning and a lot of secrecy about what ranking methods were now being used, hurt a lot of small businesses in the process; you don't have to look very hard on many forums to see how badly some people were affected.
And even trying to recover from the change, it's also very difficult. Even after disavowing any outside links, former SEO experts seem pretty clueless about how to improve visibility or even show up on the first few pages for Google now. Short of advice like "rewrite all of your product descriptions so that they don't match anything you have on ebay, so that you're not flagged as duplicating content", there's little help to be found.
Ignorance is not a valid defence. Yes, it's harsh, but that's what entrepreneurs sign up for when they start their own business.
Directors of companies are held responsible for the decisions they made. Delegating that decision to others does not abrogate their responsibilities.
If you are in the SEO industry, please stop hiding behind this. The SEO industry have had ample time and patience to clean itself up (naming and shaming these unethical SEO consultant for starters, offering up material small businesses and mom-and-pop operators, checklists in hiring an ethical SEO practitioner, checklists of methods/practices that should be avoided. How to write up clear statements of work).
I am not in the SEO industry, and said nothing in defense of unethical SEO practices. My parents are also very ethical people, and would only do business with others they felt were the same way. Just because someone participated in affiliate marketing in previous years, with consenting partner sites, before it was outlawed by Google, does not make them immoral and irresponsible.
And besides paying Google to exist, no one my parents ever talked to even seems to know what it takes these days to show up on Google anymore, because it's secret, so no worries because Google's moral crusade has been successful, never mind the collateral damage.
Well, one of the big lessons of running an internet-based business (or any business, really) is "don't build your business on top of third-party services that you have no contract with or control over."
As you've seen, you can have the rug swept out from under you overnight and there's nothing you can do about it. That's why people are so dismissive of SEO, it (mostly) doesn't create actual value and it's subject to the whims of Google. Your parents fell into that trap.
As jacques said, "the most solid way to grow a business is to find your customers through references and to keep them happy." The old-fashioned way never fails. Get out there and make some people so happy they want to tell all their friends.
"Just because someone participated in affiliate marketing in previous years, with consenting partner sites, before it was outlawed by Google, does not make them immoral and irresponsible."
Interesting. Show me where in Google's guidelines Google says it outlaws affiliate marketing.
I'm really sorry for your parents. That said, I think that being clueless about doing business on the internet and doing business on the internet is a combination that should not come with a guaranteed pay-out. If you then employ someone to act on your behalf (without understanding) then even though your intentions are good you could get hurt.
In that sense I sympathize less with your parents than that I sympathize with the owners of the sites that got bombarded with links to your parents website.
Nobody has an automatic right to turnover based on intentions. The most solid way to grow a business is to find your customers through references and to keep them happy, treat any search engine traffic just like you would treat a walk-in new customer. Pamper them and make them happy, don't count on them coming but when they do make sure they stay.
Your parents actively pumped resources (money) into a fight that they could have chosen to simply not engage in. SEO's are a scummy bunch and I see their pitches on a daily basis so I don't fault your parents for falling for it. Even so, the loss of this traffic and the dent to their reputation is their own fault (doing business in unfamiliar territory comes with harsh penalties) and the fault ofthe SEO's who did it to them (though I clearly think the SEO's are vastly more at fault here).
Recovering from the change is hard for a reason, I fail to understand why your parents website should 'show up in the first few pages of Google', there is no automatic right to that and there are only so many subjects and 'first few pages' to begin with.
Rewriting your product descriptions may or may not be a good idea, I don't particularly care about having duplicate content on my sites because I don't particularly care about google traffic.
I understand that if google traffic is all you have that this could all be very hard to stomach and that it may even mean going out of business altogether. But if all the mom-and-pop stores that give a few $100 to shady SEOs would stop doing business online I know that my workload will go down by several hours per week at a minimum. So from that point of view I would not be too sad.
Still, I believe that your mom and dad may be able to survive this if they learn that relying on a single source of traffic is not a good idea. Much better to really build relationships with other online properties that carry weight with their prospective consumers, or to do it like everybody else is doing it: by spending their money on advertising instead of on trying to game organic search.
Your assertion that SEO's are unequivocally a scummy bunch is wrong and seems pretty irrational to me. A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words. The fact that these SEO companies also did affiliate marketing (not spamming links on message boards and people's websites!), used to be considered pretty white hat and necessary to get any sort of ranking above page 39 or something.
Advertising via adwords and things like that is a very expensive activity, with no guarantee of increasing legitimate traffic and interested customers. Prices have increased greatly over time in most categories, and though larger businesses might have the margins where losing a few tens or hundreds of thousands here and there on ineffective advertising might not be a problem, but it disproportionately is for smaller businesses.
The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.
> A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words.
For the most part we are in agreement here (except for the 'legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words', if there are 100 companies in a certain field then only 10 of them will show up on page 1, regardless of any reasons to show up).
> The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.
This we also are very strongly in agreement on. Monoculture is bad. Monopolies are bad. And no, bing, ddg and so on do not count.
And even trying to recover from the change, it's also very difficult. Even after disavowing any outside links, former SEO experts seem pretty clueless about how to improve visibility or even show up on the first few pages for Google now. Short of advice like "rewrite all of your product descriptions so that they don't match anything you have on ebay, so that you're not flagged as duplicating content", there's little help to be found.