Google Business Sitebuilder

» see wozaonline.co.za as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Google Business Sitebuilder never had a consumer name, which is part of why nobody mourned it. It was the engine underneath a run of country-branded programs, each one a local campaign with its own domain and its own partner, all doing the same thing: giving a small business a free website, usually with a year of free hosting and a free address attached.

The Kenyan version went live in September 2011 as Getting Kenyan Businesses Online, at kbo.co.ke. South Africa followed in January 2012 as Woza Online, at wozaonline.co.za, run with the Department of Trade and Industry alongside Vodacom. Nigeria got gnbo.com.ng and Malaysia got getmybusinessonline.com.my. There was an Indonesian one at bisnisgoonline.co.id, an Indian one at indiagetonline.in and a continental getafricaonline.com.

The pitch was aimed at businesses that had never had a web page at all, and in those markets that was most of them. Google put the number of South African businesses on Woza Online at around 40,000.

~ the case file ~

~ the programs ~

These campaigns were not purely philanthropic and the Kenyan one is on record for it. In January 2012 the Kenyan business directory Mocality salted its database and caught Google Kenya's Getting Kenyan Business Online team cold-calling Mocality's own listings while implying the two companies were partners. Google apologized. That story has its own grave on this site.

Woza Online picked up a different problem. Within about a year of launch the free platform was being used as a base for fraud, with scammers standing up retailer-shaped pages and taking orders through them. Google did not name that as the reason for closing, but it was in the air.

~ the shutdown FAQ ~

The announcement came as a support-page question and answer, and the phrasing is worth reading because of what it draws a line under. "Google Business Sitebuilder websites for users who signed up through the any of the following programs, will stop being visible to visitors on 15 March 2015," it said, and then listed all six campaigns by name. The typo is Google's.

A second paragraph gave owners a stay: they could still log in to the admin account "to retrieve photos and text if you wish to move them to a different website tool, at least until 1 May 2015." Asked about it, Google told Fin24 that "Closing offerings always involve tough choices." The suggested next steps were paid hosting somewhere else, or a free listing on Google My Business.

~ what a listing is not ~

A listing is a pin on a map with opening hours attached. For a business whose only web presence had been one of these sites, the swap removed the price list and the paragraph explaining what the owner actually does. Google ran the same play again later with Business Profile websites, which it switched off in March 2024, so the pattern is now documented twice.

~ google's own 404 ~

Eleven years on, the campaign domains still resolve. wozaonline.co.za, kbo.co.ke and gnbo.com.ng all answer, and every one of them serves Google's house error page, the one with the broken robot and the heading "Error 404 (Not Found)!!1".

Turkey was never on the list, so no Turkish shop had a Google-built website to lose. The part I recognize anyway is who carries the loss. Running the free tier is cheap for the company and the site on it is the entire internet for the person using it, and when the arithmetic changes at head office it is the shop owner who has to find somewhere new to put the photographs.

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