Observing a business melt-down is never easy on former customers, when you think what could’ve been. Just think of Palm Pilot, Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, AOL, etc… the technology tides are always turning. But few companies make much of a recovery once they hit their death spiral.
Down, down, down
Just recently SBI somehow managed to cross the 1/3 threshold in which 1/3 of their previous customer’s accounts (domains & full accounts) evaporated in the past four years. Today, I calculated that they have lost 33.9% of their accounts since December 2010. Amazing to watch a business just disintegrate like that. Has to have been a case of hubris, on their part.
At the current rate of domain loss (5.8K per year), there will not be any business left in three or four years. But what has been most alarming to watch: the increasing rate of domain loss across Evoy’s kindgom.
So what went wrong?
To get sidetracked by BlockBuilder 2, to ignore your customers and vilify those who were telling you there were problems, and to produce unreadable reports with barely a shred of evidence to show the results actually worked.
In other words, you drive car A, and I drive car B. We both drive to the same destination, you arrive first and claim that you always arrive first because your car uses XYZ-oil. And so do all your friends. So it must be.
Completely irrelevant that your car or my car or anyone’s car uses XYZ oil, when you drive a Ferrari, and I a Suzuki. Then it turns out that you were driving above the speed limit on the highway. And got pulled over by the cops on the way back.
How a major report got it all wrong?
Just because some sites appeared to do better because of specific reasons doesn’t mean a thing, if those reasons are unverified, unverifiable… or anything. It’s like arguing how many angels there are on a pinhead. Your arguments can never be relevant.
In reality, what happened: the technology tides turned again, and Evoy’s ship got beached in the low water eddies, while everyone else sailed off. It’s not that SBI didn’t have warnings that things were about to change, but the signs were there already before BB2 was launched (late, behind schedule, and hugely underpowered).
In reality, I believe that the SBI system became a huge content farm, with similar site structures, similar content styles, similar HTML markup, etc.; combined with a LINK farm of interlinking between SBI domains; that was outdated (except if you did Upload it yourself) in design; and lost the impetus they had gathered until 2012. All of these sites were also doing huge amounts of C2 pages (seen as content spam); and almost all had significant IP address similarities. What other conclusion could one draw?
The keypoint is that I say “I believe”. I cannot see into the mind of Google any more than KE can. My mistake was to believe KE, and forgo WordPress while I built several useless sites on his system. I will not forgo WordPress again for any proprietary system!