SEO/SEM

Search Engine Favored?

Should search engines give favor to registered businesses?

For the past several years I have been doing all I can locally to push for web developer licensing and business registration. I have been doing this to encourage those who are not a registered business to file for registration. Every year I hear from dozens of clients who fall victim to web developers who are not on the "up and up". These clients are swindled out of their money and never get their site developed.
Therefore, I have been pushing Ohio representatives to enact laws that will require a state/federal license requirement for web developers, more specifically, e-commerce developers. After all, if you have to have a license to cut hair, shouldn't you have a license when you have access to hundreds if not thousands of sites and customer financial information.
Until that day happens, I'm hoping the search engines will take a pro-active stance on this and start adjusting the search results to give higher preference to search results of registered businesses (llc, ltd, inc, corp, etc).
If Google were to implement this criteria in their search results, the unregistered web developers and other unregistered businesses would not get higher preference in the results. This would force businesses to have to register themselves as a company. This would have the following impact on the industry.
1. It would give Google a positive light as it would be encouraging people to be honest and ethical and register their business within their state or federal government.
2. This in turn would protect the general public from un-registered hobbyist or the unscrupulous.
3. The increase in registrations would help to add revenue to state coffers because of the increase of business registration fees.
4. It would temporarily give a boost to the honest and ethical businesses that are already registered as a business in their state or federal government.
I hope Google and it's board will give consideration to this and help me in my goal of creating a more ethical and honest internet. Together, we can encourage legislation to promote this agenda and at the very least promote self regulation in the industry that has run a foul with dishonest web developers and other fly by night operations.

Google Update May 2009

Google changes are coming soon!

Some activity in the search engine indicates some changes in the Google Algorithm are currently in progress. How do I know? Well, for starters, since 2002, www.dynamicwebs.com, will drop in and out and bounce around from page to page of the search results during what I call an "Algorithm Purge". During this algorithm purge sites are re-indexed, spidered and ranked based on their site content. For the past seven years, dynamicwebs.com has consistantly ranked in the top 1-3 pages of the search engines for the term "Ohio Web Design". As of today, 5/26/09, dynamicwebs.com has been dropped completely from the search results. This means that the domain has been removed from the results for further inspection by computerized means or for human inspection. The reason for this could be for any reason related to algorithm changes or it could be the result that dynamicwebs.com has recently gone through a complete content make-over. Regardless, because the site is no longer in the google index for "ohio web design", it is a pretty good indication that a algorithm purge is going to take place in the next few days or weeks. It will also mean that a lot of sites will re-shuffle in the results. Let's hope this purge and re-indexing is a little more accurate than previous purge/shuffles.