The Web changes fast nowadays. Just ask your parents or grandparents. Failing that, find any site built more than a couple of years ago and consider how archaic it now looks. But is all this change always a good thing?
One of the biggest changes for most small to medium business owners has been the increased value in website speed in Google’s ranking system – Its a difficult act to get right. On the one hand you want to present information as well as possible to your surfers – and on the other you now need to get that information downloaded as fast as possible – especially on mobile devices, where around 70% of first searches are taking place these days.
As website owners we should be constantly aware of our place in the race for more speed, but there are other speed based considerations to take into account too!
Have you ever tried booking a plane ticket, only to come back later (sometimes minutes later) to find the price has changed? This can make booking whole holidays in one go nigh on impossible, and woe betide you if you take a moment to go tell your partner what you have found. The same can be true on Amazon.
The Danger to Website Owners
Holiday-booking irritation aside, similar trends can have serious implications for website owners. The way Google and other search engines list sites is changing all the time. These changes can drop pages a long way down the search rankings, reducing the visitors and profits of operators drastically. Even worse, most significant updates result in at least some innocent pages getting blacklisted or removed from Google’s search list. For anyone other than a search engine expert or Google employee, this can be very hard to reverse.
As well as the big updates, which are at least explained vaguely, Google’s employees and AI apps are constantly making tweaks. While this is intended to improve the experience of search users, it can often lead to them losing their way to pages. Meanwhile, page owners and SEO experts have trouble keeping up with the search engine.
Of course, there is the darker side. Allegations of monopoly and anti-competitive practices are making their way through courts and legal inquiries around the world. We’ll leave that for the law though.
Adaptation is often a good thing for users and people in general, however many of the alterations made constantly and rapidly by big tech can seem at best like change for change’s sake.
At worst they come across as self-serving ways of pulling in profits at the expense of users and customers.
When a company dominates as much as Google or Amazon, it doesn’t have to worry about losing customers because, short of leading a nomadic lifestyle in Mongolia, it’s impossible for users to leave them. That’s why big tech doesn’t need to focus on user experience.
PS: When I tried to save this document, Microsoft Word gave me no other choice than its own OneDrive service. Extra faffing was required even to save my file to my own computer. Accident or selfishness at the expense of users?