Google Now Requires You To Pay To Appear On 1st Page Of Some Search Results

If you need a reason to diversify your business and focus on social media and traffic from sources other than Google look no further. Over the past year I have watched as Google has progressively tried to milk more money out of their search results by continuing to add more paid results and links to other Google services. This has effectively pushed everyone else below the fold of the page.

Lets look at a basic example, say you create a site about cell phones and are trying to rank on the first page of Google (above the fold) for that term. Well I think it’s pretty safe to say that this is no longer technically possible. Take a look how the results below are formatted – I’ve highlighted all paid results and results for other Google services in red.

You will notice that first page of results has 3 paid results at the top, some of which are now showing sub links which expands this area even further down the page. After the paid results there are two non paid results (for the official site and wikipedia page, which are going to be impossible to outrank for the most part) followed by links from other Google services.

The good news is that so far this is only for major keywords and brand names. Long tail keywords don’t seem to take as much of a hit from Google spamming its own services. However some longer keywords are starting to display the Local Results map which tends to push results 4 – 10 down below the fold of the page and results in a pretty drastic decrease in clicks.

There is no doubt that this has been causing an increased amount of frustration for many site owners. Believe it or not, some good may come out of this situation.

For one thing, it’s becoming much harder for someone with a site or online service that offers little or no value to get traffic because of the shifting focus to social media. The only way many of these sites and services have been able to stay in the game this long is through Google search and their days of getting decent traffic from that are fairly numbered. These sites won’t spread virally and usually don’t do well with Facebook or Twitter.

For those of you who are getting in the game now it’s more important than ever to create quality content, and build a community around your site or service that will allow you to thrive with social media. Search traffic will be around for a long time, but soon there will be much less of it to go around for those who aren’t willing to pay for it.