My Personal Opinion on Google Feeds

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and give MY personal thoughts and MY personal research...

As everyone knows, I make and sell soap. So do 100's of 1000's of others... Google means almost nothing to me and my product... I am on Google, but so are those 100's of 1000's of others... I'd think the same goes for just about anything that isn't rare, unique, etc.

It seems to me that the complaint isn't being worded correctly... it isn't that we aren't on Google (because we are, or at least most of our items are), but that people don't think their items are high enough in the seach pages...

I did a little bit of research and used similar 'generic' items that are on several competitor sites... and guess what? Their items are in no better position than ours are (some better, some worse, most about the same). I also found that what comes up on the front page of my Google searches comes up differently on my husbands Google searches for the exact same thing...

Not only that, but here are the results for the first 10 pages of Google when I searched for Nag Champa Soap (my top selling soap scent):
Etsy....... bottom of page 2 (1 listing)
eBay...... 5th listing on page 6 (1 listing)
Etsy....... bottom of page 6 (1 listing, not the same as the listing on the bottom of page 2, so it's a different seller, which proves that simply being on a site with full googlization doesn't mean equal exposure in the search engine)
Craigs List... top of page 7 (1 listing)
Amazon....... 2nd listing on page 8 (1 listing)

Now, there are more than 34,000 listings on Google for Nag Champa Soap (that's all I put in). eBay has 626 listings under Nag Champa Soap(that is including the 478 store listings), but only one showed up on Google in the first 10 pages, and that one showed up in the middle of page 6. Etsy has 50 listings, but only 2 showed up in Google, one on the bottom of page 2 and one on the bottom of page 6. Craigs list had 4 total listings for Tucson, which is where the one that showed up on page 7 of Google is from. And Amazon has 54 results, but only one showed up in the first 10 pages of Google, coming in on page 8 of the Google search.

I think this shows that it takes more than just a site having Googlization, RSS, or SEO feeds. Think of all the sites that have Nag Champa soap and didn't make the first 10 pages!!! That's right... even the current Flavor of the Month sites didn't show up in the first 10 pages!!! You have to ask yourself why, with more than 600 listings of Nag Champa on eBay, why is it that only ONE shows up... and not until the middle of page 6??? So they aren't garnering the same advantages in the search that they had when I was still selling there last year...

No One Is.

So it appears, at least to me, that just being on Google isn't enough... you have to get more attention drawn to yourself in other ways... like blogs, chats, personal websites, posts on other sites, individual entry into Google and other search engines, etc... which is what many of us already knew.

No one has a free ride to the front page of Google any more in a generic search... not even the bay... you either have to pay for that front page exposure or your venue (like OLA or the bay) or you have to get out there and promote yourself...

...at least that's what my research shows...

I know that the chief reason people give for not promoting themselves is that they don't have the time... another reason is that they don't consider themselves 'techy' enough... and third seems to be they don't think it's their responsibility, that that is what they pay a site to do for them... I've always been of the opinion that this is MY business (regardless of what site I'm selling on) and I am directly responsible for it's success or failure. If I don't have the time to self promote, I can pay a service. If I'm not 'techy' enough to help my own business succeed, I can ask someone to help me (here at OLA) or I can pay someone to help me (locally). It is MY responsibility to run my business and that means it is MY responsibility to promote myself. The last time I let someone else do everything for me, that 'someone' was the only entity benefiting... and when I realized that it was no longer MY business, I left... and came here.

I came here from eBay. I didn't know any more about anything than anyone else. No idea of what self promotion meant... no idea of what html was... no idea of how to build a template... no idea of what a RSS or SEO feed was... or the difference between them... I came with a desire to run my own business... a desire to learn... a desire to succeed or fail by my own hand... just like everyone else... I learned something every day until I could do individual tasks by myself... I'm still learning (as anyone who has seen my blog can attest... lol...)... and I will continue learning... and there may come a time when I pay someone to do what I don't have time to do, what I'm not smart enough to learn to do, what I think is someone elses responsibility... although I doubt that I will ever consider MY business 'someone elses' responsibility.

JMHO