• by Ross Fadner , December 3, 2003

Google's at it again, shaking up its natural search results ranking system, and in the process, ruffling a few feathers in the Web publishing henhouse.

Some business owners who depend on the Web's top search engine's ability to drive Internet users to their web sites say that the change threatens to put a damper on their revenue at a particularly inopportune time: the crucial fourth-quarter holiday shopping season.

While a little fine-tuning to Google's page-ranking software is not an uncommon occurrence, this latest mid-November modification has hit more web sites than usual and has become the subject of several web log and chat room tirades.

One San Francisco retailer laments that the ranking system overhaul has plummeted his web site's ranking from no. 1 to no. 250 on the results page. Although the man revealed that his company also pays for advertising on Google Inc.'s sites, the drop in natural rank could potentially put his company out $20,000 in sales per month.

Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google, concedes that the change was more about preserving high-quality search results for the site's users, and that pleasing web publishers was not the purpose of the software update. "This particular change affected more people, but our testing shows there was a significant quality improvement for our users," said Rosing.

Rosing further added that it is impossible to make everyone happy in this case, maintaining that "I wouldn't say (Google) botched it; I'd say it's affected a lot of good businesses as well as a lot of less reputable ones."

Talk of Google's possibly pending IPO has fueled further speculation that the shake-up comes as part of a scheme to urge more web publishers to advertise with Google to ensure their visibility on the results page. Rosing vehemently denied this, claiming that Google's search and advertising businesses "are completely separated - there is no linkage between the two."

Andrew Goodman, principal of search advertising firm Page Zero Media, said that the volume of complaints has risen in recent weeks, speculating that most appear to be coming from individuals who work in search engine optimization, teaching techniques such as repeating certain words on web pages to boost natural search rankings. Goodman adds that the recent software shake-up underscores Google's commitment to weeding out sites whose natural rankings are higher than they should be. "There are tons of ways that people have used to fool Google (to get a better ranking). I really do believe they're trying to improve the quality of their results," Goodman said.