December 3, 2003

Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google, said the change is part of the Silicon Valley-based company's efforts to provide high-quality search results.

Some business owners who depend on Google driving Internet users to their Web sites are angry over a change to the top search engine's ranking system, which they say threatens to dent their revenue during the holiday shopping season.

One San Francisco retailer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters on Tuesday the change sent his company's rank among Google search results from No. 1 to No. 250.

The man, who has also signed up for paid advertisements on Google Inc.'s sites, said the drop in rank has hurt his visibility on www.google.com, which helps to generate about $20,000 in sales each month.

Serious tweaks to Google's page ranking software are not uncommon, but this latest one -- rolled out in mid-November -- has hit more Web sites than usual and become the subject of numerous angry rants in Internet chat rooms.

Click here to continue reading this news story.

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.