An In Depth Look at Google`s Potential Buyout of GoDaddy - The Effect
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Now for the million dollar question: what if a purchase actually happens? The main concern people have with this deal is how it will affect a publisher's ability to make a living online. Being the Internet's biggest search engine means that they have the lion's share of the search traffic. They also control the largest ad network on the web, so a publisher could easily find themselves in hot water if they end up on Google's bad side, however that might happen. And as a result of the deal, Google would reign over more domains than any other company, leaving any publisher who chose to buy their domains from another registrar at a disadvantage to those who decided to use GoDaddy -- assuming Google decided in some way to favor those who'd bought from GoDaddy. As you can see, we're teetering on the edge of a complete monopoly, but hey, that's capitalism, you bend the rules as far as they'll go without breaking.
That is the bad news, depending on where you're coming from. As for the good news, we will return to the deal's effect on search engine optimization. Simply put, many are hoping that this deal will do great things in terms of removing spam from search engine results; after all, that's what Google is all about. An example of those that will be affected by this are the black hat SEOs.
"What the hell is that?" you ask. Well, a general definition of a black hat SEO would be using any, and I mean any, technique whatsoever to maximize search rankings, usually in violation of search engine rules and regulations. Not only that, but the sites themselves will take a hit in terms of quality because their designers opted instead to take the nefarious path toward temporary high search engine rankings. Black hat SEO involves techniques like keyword stuffing (stuffing your site with long lists of nothing but keywords), invisible text (putting keywords in the same color text as the background), and doorway pages (a fake page used only to attract search engine spiders). Using any of these techniques will most likely get your site banned from search engines.
As you may have guessed, there are those that do use black hat SEO techniques who are extremely worried about the possible Google/GoDaddy convergence. Google would all of a sudden have the ability to look at all of the registration details for GoDaddy's clients. Earlier in the article, I mentioned briefly that Google would also gain domain expiration information, giving them the ability to detect a switch in domain ownership in real time. This could be bad news for those who possess an expired domain that still enjoys a high PageRank. I'm guessing this won't stop them though. The Internet is so vast that they'll probably find some way to hide their tracks.
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