Half-hearted Google Gripes
by Randall McCarley
June 25th, 2007
Some days Google bugs me. Today is one of those days. Don’t get me wrong - I think Google offers a terrific product but some of the “solutions” they come up with are only effective because they are The Google.
I was following some link referrals and came across this thread at Joomla where the original poster asks for help with his .htaccess and joew says:
Go to www.google.com/webmasters You can add all of your websites and even choose it to be refrenced as www or http
I found this to be the best way to go. It also has alot of the tools you need for other SEO stuff
The problem here is that most website owners take it for granted that Google can solve their problems, especially when *Google* offers a solution.
In this case the problem is the old www vs. non-www problem described on Seeing Double. The search engines have a difficult time knowing the difference between “www.yoursite.com” and just “yoursite.com”. Or more precisely, the search engines have a hard time knowing that both versions are the exact same site and should be treated as one instead of two.
So Google offered a fix: just log in to their webmaster console and you can set your preference so they will know what’s up.
Great idea but Google is not the only search engine out there. I think they are taking advantage of their reputation and misleading a lot of webmasters as to how effective this “fix” really is.
Another gripe today is the whole nofollow issue. Links that may not be trustworthy can be tagged with rel=”nofollow” so Google and the other search engines don’t harm your site if that link ends up going bad. I think this is a lousy solution and puts the burden on the website owner instead of the search engine.
It seems you have to be an SEO just to protect your site thee days.
And finally I think I figured out why Google is busy buying up as much of the internet as possible: reputation management.
A quick check for Google at WordTracker reveals Google products and services dominate the results. Pretty hard to find Google Gripes unless you know where to look.
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June 25th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
The problem isn’t with Google, but with webmasters. Particularly, with joew. One needs to realise that there are many other search engines and bots that index content (not just Google).
To be fair to Joe, though, Google does send way more traffic than any other search engine. Of course, some sports or women-product-targeted website may do well in Yahoo or MSN, but Google will still send more traffic their way, in my opinion.
For example, I specifically block feeds from Google only (because it supports wildcards in robots.txt). I don’t care if my duplicate content feeds show up in MSN/Yahoo (in fact, I do care, but I don’t know the right way to do that without blocking the entire website).
And I don’t think the primary reason to buy companies is to manage reputation. They buy them to spread out - it is easier to buy, than to develop something - you’d need many product managers/dev leaders to manage product development then, for example.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
I think Google is enjoying its size a bit too much and not being exactly forthcoming about the effects their “solutions” have in a broader scope. Not that it is necessarily their obligation to do so. But with a motto like “Do no evil…” I expect better things.
It’s tough to blame the webmasters because they just honestly don’t know any better. Like usability, SEO is not taught in classrooms (ok, maybe a few, finally!). There are disciplines in web development that web designers have to go out of their way to learn and that doesn’t happen until they are made aware of them and how important they really are. Google has about half the search market but that still leaves the other half - it doesn’t matter if those referrals come from one engine or ten! Excluding all of them makes as much sense as including them but excluding Google.
The reputation management crack was a bit tongue in cheek.
July 12th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
“Great idea but Google is not the only search engine out there. I think they are taking advantage of their reputation and misleading a lot of webmasters as to how effective this “fix” really is.”
Google almost always suggests both setting preferred domain and installing 301 redirects.
http://googlewebmastercentral......omain.html
“If I use this feature, should I still use a 301 redirect on my site?
You don’t need to use it for Googlebot, but you should still use the 301 redirect, if it’s available. This will help visitors and other search engines.”
http://googlewebmastercentral......20indexing
“Redirect to the preferred version of the URL
You can do this using 301 (permanent) redirect. In the first example that shows four URLs that point to a site’s home page, you may want to redirect index.html to www.example.com/. And you may want to redirect example.com to www.example.com so that any URLs that begin with one version are redirected to the other version. Note that you can do this latter redirect with the Preferred Domain feature in webmaster tools. (If you also use a 301 redirect, make sure that this redirect matches what you set for the preferred domain.)”
http://googlewebmastercentral......guidelines
“For instance, if you want all of your URLs indexed using the www version, don’t use this tool to request removal of the non-www version. Instead, specify the version you want indexed using the Preferred domain tool (and do a 301 redirect to the preferred version, if possible). ”
And if a webmaster can’t figure out Google isn’t the only search engine out there, then he/she isn’t much of a webmaster. Seriously, who isn’t aware of yahoo.com, ask.com, and live.com? I bet every webmaster has tried yahoo.com at least once in his life. If a webmaster thinks setting preferred domain will solve his problems with yahoo, he needs to start thinking
“Pretty hard to find Google Gripes”
Just read Graywolf’s archives or run a search for “site:google rick1″ and you’ll get your fill of anti-Google gripes
July 13th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Sure but you looked for that information. Most webmasters don’t. And this all flies in the face of “build for people” which implies the burden of solving these issues should be on the SEs. But instead of fixing their problems they are shifting more responsibility onto the webmaster (think: nofollow). What I’m really trying to say is that Google is getting further away from their initial vision - and rules - whether they realize it or not.
Do you really think most webmasters know about live.com? I’m not so sure…