You Need To Listen

Absolutely appalling is my first thought.

From the research I have done, it appears sometime in May of 2011 Google released their Google Toolbar 7.1 which includes Google’s New Google Related feature. I don’t normally use Internet Explorer as I prefer Firefox with all its web developer add-ons. Last night I decided to check backlinks on a few of my websites so I dusted off Internet Explorer and installed the latest version of Google Toolbar. I would have had the toolbar installed for Firefox but Google decided to stop developing their Google Toolbar for that popular browser.

After loading Google Toolbar I went to my site for my computer repair business. To my surprise I see a nice looking slide up at the bottom of my page. My first thought was someone hacked my site and installed some code to display the panel. Then I noticed the wonderful Google Related logo on the left and thought to myself, well this is new. Upon further inspection I noticed ads for other computer repair businesses on the panel. I again thought to myself, what in the heck is this. The words I thought of were a little harsher than that but you get the point. So my first instinct is to move my mouse cursor down to investigate. After hovering over one of the ads to my surprise a nice little popup window appears over the top of my site displaying a preview of a competing site. I immediately figured out what was going on and took the screenshot below.

I just could not believe my eyes. Was this really happening and from Google no less? Google has always provided great services to businesses to help them with their websites such as Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics and that is only a couple.

My first stop was to my favorite website professional forum. I did a quick search to see if anything was posted about this issue. Nothing was found so I started a new thread and asked the community if they had seen this before. After posting I started doing some research using Google no less to try and see if this was able to be disabled. To my surprise I found one post dated back to August of 2011 with this issue being discussed.

First there was a CSS fix that apparently worked for a while that disabled the iframe that the toolbar was creating. Then Google got smart to that and made a change in the way it was displayed. As of the writing of this article I have found no solution to stop this infringement on my website’s space.

I just can’t believe that Google would do this. In my opinion this is worse than Facebook’s mess up of 2009 with their privacy settings. This will affect people’s livelihoods. You see webmasters spend a ton of time and resources in an attempt to get visitors to their site. Now Google is going to tell my website visitors after all the hard work and money spent, hey you’ve come to a great site but here you might want to check out these other sites that are paying us to be on the site that you are on. Come on!

This is as unethical as it gets. We as webmasters have got to let Google know that this is not okay! GOOGLE YOU NEED TO LISTEN!