What is going on? See e-mail received today!

[inbakumar]

It is with great regret that I have to inform you that Top-pile.com Ltd has no alternative but to cease trading with immediate effect. It is intended to place the company into voluntary liquidation immediately aftera shareholders meeting in 3 weeks time.

This situation has arisen as a result of very poor trading in the last 12 months, which in turn was primarily caused by the probelms we have encountered with search engines during that time.

Our problems began with the SALSA system in February, 2004. In the month prior to that we achieved record traffic through the SALSA system of over 90,000 visitors per day and client satisfaction was at an all-time high. Then in February we lost approximately half of our positions in G***le and traffic dropped to about 50,000 visitors per day. We spent the following month conducting extensive analysis of the G***le changes and trying to understand why one half of the SALSA sites had disappeared and the other half were still performing. This exercise became academic when, in mid-March 2004, we lost the remaining positions in G***le and traffic dropped to 15,000 visitors per day.

The situation was worsened by the fact that Yah** had just launched a new index and search engine and we had yet to feature prominently in it and inktomi's abandonment of Paid Inclusion meant that we were also suffering in M*N.

The combination of these three factors led to a very real threat of the domesday scenario of having to refund all SALSA sites sold in January, February and March as a result of their failing to achieve the guarantee, a total potential refund of some £350,000 that would have been catastrophic for the company.

As it was, our analysis of G***le led us to the predominance of well rated sites in the results simply because they had a page that mentioned the search term, and from this we took a number of well rated sites and built large directories off them related to the search terms being promoted in the SALSA system. This had a dramatic effect on our positions in G***le and saved us from a refund situation that would almost certainly have bankrupted the company back then, although we did still refund approximately £100,000 over the course of the following months.

From this experience we created top4clicks and partnered with well rated sites to create large directories of search terms and we would share the income. Top4clicks started off very well and within a few months we had 400 accounts open spending a peak of £3,700 per day. The sitiuation looked very good and we were well on course to achieve £10,000 income per day by January. This also gave us the opportunity to discontinue SALSA which could best be described as limping along but absorbing significant customer support resources (although many established SALSA sites continued to achieve good traffic levels from Yah** and M*N).

Unfortunately, it proved to be a false dawn. Despite these directories complying in all respects with G***le's guidelines, from November onwards G***le's algorithms appeared to shift and the directories started gradually disappearing, to the point where we have gone in 4 months from 400 clients spending in total £3,700 per day to 1,050 accounts spending in total £300 per day.

Throughout the last year our cashflow has steadily deteriorated and we are now in a situation that even if we could fix the issues with SALSA / top4clicks we no longer have the time or resources to do so. We have cut the staffing levels down from nearly 40 to just 5 in the last few weeks and the turnover just keeps on getting worse. We now have no prospect of paying off the debts that have accumulated and we have no alternative but to cease trading.

I cannot over-emphasize how sorry I personally am that this situation has arisen. We had a great team here at top-pile and it has been heart-breaking to see it torn apart over the last few months. We prided ourselves on the fact that we represented one of the only realistic alternatives for SMEs who wanted success on the Internet but the search engines are determined to ensure that that is not the case and that ultimately all companies will need to do business with them if tehy want to succeed on the Internet. I continue to believe that this is not fair and that SMEs are entitled to a fairer slice of the search engine pie considering it is their content that has made the search engines successful in the first place. But I will not dwell too long on that thorny subject here!

As a result of the company ceasing trading, all services will cease with immediate effect.

Please once again accept my apologies for this situation. I sincerely hope that we will all meet up again under better circumstances.

Regards

Paddy Bolger
CEO

[peterjhale]

is this for real ?

If so, morale is, dont rely on organic SE traffic

[inbakumar]

As far as I know it is for real. I think, I got the email because we subscribed to their directory some time ago. I did check their website but it was down!

What concerns me is that if the search engines are going to force small companies to advertise on the search engines to generate traffic then it is going to be difficult for small and medium sized companies. The cost of advertising will go up and force those companies to exit the internet channel.

Regards,

Joel

[InterACT]

This was always going to happen and when Google came about I could not see why some people saw it as the "saviour of the net" they are just after your money like all the others now.