Finally, proof that Google is sometimes useless
by Sapphire (July 8, 2008)
There are actually times when Google does your site more harm than good. Unless all you’re concerned about is traffic.
A couple of months ago, I switched domains for Project B-2 Bomber. At first, the traffic stayed high, then it dropped from 20-25k per month down to about 13k. Reason: Google had kept the PR on the main page, but dumped all the internal PR. They went from sending me 10k hits a month to around 3k.
Here’s the thing. The site’s never been better. The amount of commenters are the same. The inbounds are growing by leaps and bounds. You know who I lost when Google stopped sending as much traffic as it used to? The wrong people.
B-2 constantly gets searches that contain the right words, but the wrong concepts. I’m not going to reveal the topic of the site, but to give a parallel example: Google bots can’t tell Republicans making fun of a Democrat policy from Democrats cheering about their policy. It can’t detect irony. B-2 has a lot of discussion that’s ironic and/or about stuff its visitors object to, and that’s the context Google can’t filter out. It sends me people who are very irate to read what we’re saying, which is not at all what they were after. It’s not doing them anymore good than it’s doing my site.
But who can tell the difference is the crazy amount of bloggers that keep linking every month. New bloggers, all the time. That site gets thousands of people from Blogger and Wordpress and LiveJournal subdomains, because one person will link to us and hundreds will follow that link.
That’s the traffic we want. I know sooner or later Google will reinstate PR and that traffic will come back, and that’s fine. I’m just realizing… I may find I miss this quiet time of getting nothing but quality traffic. No angry emails or confused comments. Just people who want to be there. And there are more coming every day.
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July 9th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Shhh … don’t you know it’s verboten to tell the emporer he has no clothes?
Google is probably one of the technologically astute companies ever created. The do more and give awaymore thna anyone in history.
But they suffer sorely from their preponderance of ‘techno-geeks’. There are, apparently, few people at G who could string together more than three coherent paragraphs … unless it was a term paper on LSI.
Quite frankly Yahoo!, Clusty and several others far outshine them on relevant searches when the search is something other than queries about Page Rank and ‘Net ‘mechanics’.
The idea, for example, that B-2 could have more than one meaning is not even considered. What is even dumber is, Google won’t differentiate between “b-2″ and “B-2″, even if they are in quotes. Sound like a petty complaint?
Try searching for “GPS” (as in the Global Positioning System and see how many articles come back about “GPs” as in General practitioner medical doctors, especially in the UK. I mean if G can’t even differentiate upper from lower case letters (when the meaning of the query is affected) in a three-character query, is their algorithm really as good as their press releases?
Google could profit greatly from a few more people with degrees in language, literature and human communication … they already have far too many “Propeller Heads”.
July 9th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Excellent points, Dave. Google has a lot of shortcomings like that. I hadn’t thought of it the way you phrase it, but I consistently go to Google for techno searches (Wordpress plugins, troubleshooting a server issue, etc.) and Yahoo for most everything else. You’re exactly right.