Thanks for the crap, Google

by Sapphire (May 15, 2006)

I try not to think in terms of SEO anymore. Instead of focusing on how to get the visitor to my site, I look harder at what I’m giving them when they arrive. But I do still think about how to attract them, and that includes SEOing for Google.

Recently, I reported that I’m seeing huge discrepancies with one of my sites in terms of the number of pages indexed from one Google datacenter to the next. I’m still getting a fair amount of traffic, but whatever is going on here isn’t happening on any of my other content sites. (My aff sites are another story: more on that later.)

I’m probably the last one with this news, but when I asked a friend about this, I was pointed to a Threadwatch thread which explains that a lot of sites have suddenly had many of their pages dumped out of Google’s index. A second thread from a week before sheds more light: Google’s servers aren’t keeping up with the enormous amount of crap Google is indexing. Some commenters blame Google’s obsession with services: AdSense and AdWords are hogging all their resources, and they aren’t able to keep the search results up to spec because of it.

Now, the other thing people are noticing - and I’ve seen this on my aff sites, definitely - is Google going back to really ancient crawls of the sites. I have a couple of aff sites I changed from html pages to php pages many, many months ago. Google had just finally re-indexed the new pages with the php extensions. Now it’s back to the old html pages. And there’s just nothing I can do. I’ve got the redirects set up as best I can, but the number of pages Google’s even showing varies wildly from one day to the next. It’s just ridiculous.

But here’s the other thing. Google is turning the web into a pigsty. Pagerank was supposed to encourage natural linking, but then Google made us all paranoid by having these secret rules about bad neighborhoods and mystical formulae for passing on the pagerank, and everyone’s now sitting on the metaphorical front porch of their sites with a gun and refusing to let anyone in. So what do we do to build links? We make bullshit sites, building links with directories no visitor will ever use as a directory. It’s a completely incestuous system - just a bunch of webmasters scrambling for link crumbs. And what are visitors getting? Well, at the top of Google’s search results, I usually find 3 crap sites featuring AdSense, and then if I’m lucky, a fourth site that actually has what I was looking for.

Posted in SEO
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