By Jim Kukral

Google hates you, and they love you (your money mostly).

This is the very first thing I try to communicate to new students who want to understand their future relationship with Google. And make no doubt about it, as an Internet Marketing professional, you WILL have a relationship with them, if you want any chance of being successful that is.

Google is a business. They make billions of dollars from advertisements. I have read that up to 75% of their income each year is from those same ads, probably more. When you buy Google Adwords, and you pay $1.00 (for example) to bid for the top position on your favorite most search for keyphrase, Google takes a tiny piece of that $1.00. Imagine that happening 10 million times a day or more.

Now imagine 75% of your yearly income coming from one thing. You’d want to make sure that one thing never went away, right?

The truth is that because Google is a business, they are purposely trying to NOT let you rank organically. Why? Because they want you to buy lots and lots of ads.

It’s really that simple. I’ve always argued that if they could, Google would go to the telephone book method of largest advertiser gets the biggest ad in the most viewed place. Fortunately, us, the searchers would revolt if they tried to do that.

Instead we pretend that Google really is free and fair.

Of course it’s really not. The chances of ranking in on the first page for a super-competitive term are 10,000 to 1, or worse. Yet because it’s still possible technically, we still believe it can be done. The reality is that to get on page one (organically) for something like “debt consolidation” will mean you’re competing with businesses that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on seo firms. Probably even more.

Discouraging.

Ever wonder why the infamous Google algorithm is so highly guarded? Ever think about why they essentially got rid of the importance of pagerank? Google’s job is to make it as difficult as possible for you to rank for free so you are forced to buy advertisements. Benchmarks like pagerank helped us figure out how to rank without paying.

Yes, Google hates you. But they love your money.

The good news is that because Google makes so much money, they really care about their future. That means they work overtime to keep out the junk and let the high-quality, problem solving content rise to the top.

Google is a business. Don’t ever forget it.

Note: Someone once said to me something that is very true that made me sour on the search business even more. He said, “You know why you dislike search Jim? It’s because you play by the rules.”

About Jim Kukral

For over 15-years, Jim Kukral has helped small businesses and large companies like Fedex, Sherwin Williams, Ernst & Young and Progressive Auto Insurance understand how find success on the Web. Jim is the author of the book,“Attention! This Book Will Make You Money”, as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant. Find out more by visiting www.JimKukral.com. You can also follow Jim on Twitter @JimKukral.