Google Goes on a Buying Spree
March has been an expensive one for Google. First it bought the UK site beatthatquote.com for 37.7 million pounds sterling which is $60.87 million at today’s conversion rates. Then it spent a further $32 million acquiring a part in SEO company Hubspot. Then, in the amazement of everyone it penalized beatthatquote.com by delisting it from its index. Bearing in mind that all this happened just days before the Panda update, it had SEO analysts gasping for air.
What’s going on? Each of these steps has a certain logic behind it. The beatthatquote.com deal is an obvious one. Google gains a foothold in the cut-throat UK financial products comparison market. In investing into Hubspot.com it gains a presence in one of the leading SEO companies in the world.
Both deals (we will get to the beaththatquote.com penalty in a moment) are driven by the same logic. Google has taken its broad-reach initiatives (through global search and Gmail) as far as they are likely to go. Constant updates, refinements and improvements are likely to produce tiny growth and necessary as they might be in order for Google to maintain its market lead, they can no longer form a serious part of the search giant’s expansion strategy.
This has left Google with little choice than to go vertical which means that the company is now hunting for new ways to reach deep niche customers. Websites like beatthatquote.com and Hubspot.com have managed to get ahead of their competitors, attracting Google’s attention and benefit in turn from its surplus cash reserves.
Google Penalizes its Own Site in Fair Play
While beaththatquote.com is a market leader in the UK its SEO position on Google’s search results pages was won through the employment of less than Google approved methods. Acquiring it Google had also to be seen to act in the interests of fairness. Google’s SEO guidelines regarding what is and what is not permissible on the web are not up for debate so Google had to penalize its own acquisition the moment it acquired it and became aware of its infringing practices.
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