A Business With One Vendor – Googles ‘Farmer’ Update

The past month has been filled with companies scrambling to find a solution to Googles Farmer Update, find a new business model or find a bridge with a low guardrail.  On the evening of Feb 23 many of us went to sleep after checking stats and peacefully dosed off assuming that Thursday would be like any other day in internet life.  Wrong!  I awoke back in Florida and rolled over, grabbed my laptop and checked stats … and there it was, complete devastation.  One of our sites, StarReviews lost approximately 50% of our traffic overnight, caught up in Googles Farmer update … aimed at eliminating low quality sites or content farms.  I am not even going to go into the issues and complaints associated with the update but suffice to say … many felt they were collateral damage in these sweeping changes.  12% of all searches were effected by this change and now one month later, the hopes of “coming back” have faded and the realization of lower traffic and lower revenue is sinking in and layoffs have increased and websites are closing.

All this leads to one question, who is stupid enough to build a business that relies almost completely on one vendor.  Would you build a house out of wood if there was only one (fickle) place that sold wood?  Would you buy a Chevy if there was only one place to get tires and that place could at any given moment decide not to sell you tires … and not tell you why?  That is what people were doing, relying almost completely on Google (yes Yahoo and Bing too) for their traffic and their revenue and sitting back with fingers crossed never thinking that this could happen.

Unfortunately I am one of those stupid entrepreneurs but the free traffic tasted so good, so sweet, what was I to do?  Hundreds, if not thousands of websites were “killed” because these savvy internet entrepreneurs could see past the free traffic to the pitfalls associated with those free clicks.

Lessons have been learned, respect for Google as a business partner (even from those who benefited) has diminished and thousands of entrepreneurs are saying never again.  Let’s check back in a year or two and see who has really learned their lesson.

iS3 Completes the Purchase of PCSecurityShield

On October 15th, 2010, iS3 completed the acquisition of PCSecurityShield from Frischman Enterprises, Inc.   With this transaction, I am no longer related in anyway to iS3 or PCSecurityShield.

I am making the announcement on my blog mostly because iS3 had no intentions of making the announcement and I wanted it known that I was no longer involved or responsible for PCSecurityShield.  I built PCSecurityShield over 5 years and made the decision that it would be better off in the hands of a larger, more technical company.  That may or may not be the case but only time will tell.

Redundant all over again

Why must people use the term online and website together.   You don’t need to refer to “online stock trading websites” because one could safely assume that you aren’t referring to one of those super secret offline websites … just for the sake of conversation.

Gripe #1,021

I was just about to post Gripe 1021 and I was adding a “category” as I have setup in WordPress.  I have “Stuff and Things” AND “Uncategorized” … wouldn’t something that had no category actually fall into Stuff and Things thus no longer being Uncategorized?  Sometimes I  don’t think.

Gripe #1,022

All My Sons Movers

Jess, Anna and I wait in our new house in New York for our furniture.  The movers, All My Sons, picked us up on Monday, July 12th and with an estimate of 5-8 days for delivery, we were on our way.  And while I will have a lot more to say on All My Sons, I can tell you we are now one week out and told our furniture “may” ship next week.  MAY ship next week.

Looked into all the laws and rules and regulations … ain’t nothing we can do.  Sue?  Sure, hire a lawyer and by the time anything happens, my stuff will have been delivered.

Ah, my secret weapon, I am an internet entrepreneur.  So while your blog post may languish in obscurity, mine, and those that I put on my websites, rather quickly rise to the top of the search world.  So while I will get my furniture from Jonathon and Irma at All My Sons in Jupiter one day … I will repay them with a rather long and uncomfortable lesson that words can hurt.  So tomorrow when I call and you again tell me that 5-8 days was an estimate and that I should call tomorrow, just know that my review of the situation will shortly and forever follow you.  Enjoy!

Patience of an SEO

Search Engine Optimization is about as boring as watching grass grow … in the desert.  For an ecommerce guy who is used to immediate results and cash deposited in the bank in 2-3 days it is a painful job but I have grown to understand it and I shiver when I say this … even like it.

StarReviews is one of the larger review website today.  We have over 100 categories, an active blog and the largest collection of as seen on TV video reviews and over the  last year I  have seen a slow, painfully slow, growth in spidered pages, PR and traffic and of course, revenue.  I never had anything to compare this to but when Google ran their  last update and we ended up with a bunch of PR5 and PR6 (page rank) pages throughout the site, an SEO associate of mine reminded me of what we had done when he  congratulated me on the progress.

Wow, StarReviews really is a decent site after all and we have done a great job getting to where we are.   I write this mostly because  I am an ecommerce guy, I like to optimize landing pages in hours … not months but the StarReviews project has given me a better understanding of another side of the internet.

ThePlusShops is the next project and I can  tell you that we  are fully integrating all that was learned from StarReviews into this network of niche  ecommerce  sites.  I  will talk about ThePlusShops later but for now, I guess the message is you really can learn a lesson even if you aren’t doing something you absolutely love doing.

SEO is growing on me.

By  the way, the forums at http://www.webproworld.com have some really smart people posting.   StarReviews may have been my SEO classroom but WPW was definitely my tutor.