Cheezhead

In typical, lovable, grumpy-old-man fashion, John Sumser got in my grill at Kennedy 2 weeks ago about Google. I wasn’t as cohesive as usual, following consecutive nights of alcohol consumption, but his comments were something like:

• Google traffic is crap.
• Google is responsible for only 3 percent of my traffic.
• Google is a horrible medium to drive a B-to-B audience.

“Yeah, yeah,” I thought sarcastically. “It’s all bad. First ‘job jacking,’ then social networking, then Recruiting.com. And now Google.”

(An earful from John is sometimes like listening to a senile uncle go on about inventing the question mark or making meat helmets, isn’t it?)

Again, too semi-functional for a mental fight against one of the industry’s giants, I simply came back with, “Then shut it off. Turn Google off from indexing your entire site.”

I suppose realizing that refusing to do so wasn’t an option if he wanted a leg to stand on, he agreed. I even have witnesses.

Will he?

I know John is going to do whatever John is going to do. I believe he would block every search engine from his site if pushed to ‘walk the walk.’ However, after brief reflection, I want to make a plea for John to not go through with it.

See, John’s site is very trusted in the eyes of every search engine that matters. A combination of age and ongoing content and backlinks has made ERN a goldmine for spreading Google juice.

Keep your door open to Google, John. If not for yourself and your own traffic, keep it open for us nobodies who do value search traffic and the generous backlinks you serve up to sites like mine regularly.