Google cracks down on copycat government websites

whatmichaelsays

Pincher wrote: »

If I understand it correctly, the search engines allow you to buy stats on what people search for.

Google's keyword tool provides estimated search volumes of certain keyword searches (these are freely available to anyone) but it won't tell you an awful lot.

What Google has recently stopped providing is the keywords people are search for to reach your site. If you're HM Govt, this means that you don't know how many people land on your site after searching for "E111", "EHIC", "European health card", "free european health card" "health card for spain" etc, which makes it difficult to optimise your site for the terms people are using (particularly long tail terms).

The advertisers will always be one step ahead of the search engines. Google doesn't approve every ad before publishing so it will always be behind the curve.

This isn't a government specific problem. One of my clients is a beauty product brand that has a huge problem with counterfeiting and the situation is comparable to this one. Ultimately, it is down to the government agencies to ensure that they are protecting their brands and adopting best practice digital marketing tactics. Complaining to the search engines is a waste of time and this isn't Google's problem to solve - it is a problem for the respective government agencies to solve.