Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant

Should Google offer a paid service for webmasters needing ranking help?

Sep 10, 2007 Google, Search Engine Optimization

Every so often, someone comes up with the idea that Google should offer a service that would allow webmasters to pay a fee to get specific information on ranking issues on a website, primarily for those sites that the owners feel should be ranking much better than it actually is. Because oftentimes, webmasters – particularly the “mom and pop” do it yourselfers who are not as in-tune to the latest algo changes and ranking updates – are at a loss for why their site can’t be found in Google or why they rank so far below their competitors.

While many webmasters would love to see this kind of service, the reality is that Google would never do this, at least not in my opinion. And here’s why

1. Catering to those with money. Not all webmasters would have the money to pay for the service. And suddenly Google is helping only those who can afford to pay, and too bad for those who can’t. And you know someone will raise the argument that it is the spammers who can most afford to pay Google for this kind of service

2. SEOs would be upset. Why? While they could utilize the service themselves, this would also mean that many of those people who might employ an SEO for ranking issues suddenly they wouldn’t have to since they could simply pay Google to tell them how to fix it themselves. End result, fewer businesses hiring SEOs for help, since now they can just pay Google to get that same info straight from the horse’s mouth.

3. Influencing the search rankings. Google could be accused of their organic listings suddenly being tainted by those who pay Google to help them rank better. And this certainly blurs the lines of the whole paid vs. unpaid listings in Google (although it certainly doesn’t stop Yahoo).

4. It’s just not very Google-y. Yes, they say they don’t do evil (although granted, some clearly disagree) but no matter how you slice or dice it, offering paid support to webmasters for their unpaid search listings is just a little bit on the evil side.

5. Google Webmaster Central. GWC has come a long way since the days it was originally a sitemaps tool. And fortunately for webmasters, they update it regularly adding new tools that webmasters can use to self-diagnose problems and issues Google could be having with their site. And there is no reason to believe that GWC has reached an end point for what they will make available to webmasters. However, perhaps some more documentation on not just how to use the tools, but why they are useful to site owners, would be good.

6. And there are, of course, those who would use it for evil, to see just how far various optimization techniques could be pushed and what exactly gets caught when an “innocent webmaster” pays for Google ranking support. And yes, we all know you would

So while a paid service offering help to webmasters would be nice, I just can’t see them doing it, at least not anytime in the near future. So webmasters will have to keep cornering Matt Cutts & the many other Googlers in an attempt to get personalized help for their sites at one of the industry conferences.

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