Many businesses today get a significant portion of their business via the Internet. And how do customers find these businesses? Often via a search on google.com. But guess what? Google recently made a change to their complex mathematical search algorithm --  a change that has sent many businesses from the top of the search rankings down to the very bottom. And for those businesses in this situation, the resulting dive in product sales has turned out to be a very unpleasant surprise indeed.

A recent Los Angeles Times article cites the example of Valerie Whitmore, who runs her website CDKitchen out of her home in Austin, Texas. Since its founding in 1995, CDKitchen has grown into one of the most popular cooking sites on the Internet. And much of this growth was a direct result of visitors who found the site via searches on google.com, which delivers 70 percent of CDKitchen's incoming traffic. But on February 24, 2011 -- the day that Google implemented its new search algorithm -- traffic to Whitmore's site plummeted 39 percent. According to Whitmore, Google's change pushed CDKitchen "into the abyss."

Google's reason for making the change was to reduce the visibility of low-quality content farms like eHow and Answerbag, which generate articles based on popular search queries so they will rise to the top of the rankings and attract clicks (and, therefore, advertising dollars). These sites are multiplying like rabbits, becoming increasingly bothersome for people using Google and other search engines. Unfortunately for companies like CDKitchen, the technology tweak has negatively impacted a number of legitimate businesses, pushing them down the search rankings along with the offending content farms.

So, if you haven't done a Google search on your own business within the past few weeks, then run -- don't walk -- to your nearest Web browser and give it a try. Like Valerie Whitmore, you just might be surprised by how your business now ranks in Google's search results. And the surprise may not be a pleasant one.