Complaining about Some Google Missteps – Moz
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By: Rand Fishkin
November 28, 2007
Complaining about Some Google Missteps
Search Engines
The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
I don’t generally like to pick on Google, or anyone else in particular for that matter, but since the search giant is hitting on all cylinders, I think they can probably take a little nudge or two. I’m going to keep this short, sweet and to the point (and also very self-centric, because it’s tough to effectively analyze everything that might have happened on someone else’s site):
A very popular post I wrote a few weeks back called “Google PageRank Losses for Hundreds of Websites” still hasn’t been indexed. Yahoo! has it. Live has it. Google’s visited it with their spider plenty… What gives? There’s almost 1000 links pointing to it.
Hey look… We’re back to ranking #2 for “recommended list” after we 301’d our old page to the Marketplace section. I’m going to go with the theory that we got penalized for having too much content in CSS hidden layers because we used drop-downs for the list of companies so the page wouldn’t be huge. I’m trying to make it good for users, Google! Don’t penalize for that!
SEOmoz’s Toolbar PageRank on our homepage dropped from a 7 to a 6. I had assumed that because it occurred during the normal PR update, and not 2 days beforehand when paid link sites were hit, it was a natural drop. However, logging into Webmaster Tools today, I note that the homepage has gained almost 10,000 new inbound links since I last checked a few months back… Seems awful fishy.
Speaking of Webmaster Central Tools – what the heck is this?
Thanks to the comments, I realize how dumb I must have looked for this one. It’s actually just a script from Joost de Valk, available here 🙂
Last thing on Webmaster Central – in that links section, why not offer a “sort by” option? I know I can download to Excel, but it’s such a comparative pain, and it seems like the kind of thing that would take a programmer 20 minutes to add. I’ve heard lots of folks ask for it…
Blogsearch is such a joke! I can find three copies of our content on junky splogs that no one ever links to within 10 seconds of posting a new entry on SEOmoz, but even 2 or 3 days after publishing content here, blogsearch still hasn’t picked it up. Yet, supposedly, according to Google’s own reader stats, we’re one of the top 50 or so feeds on the web (Techcrunch’s list).
If you were serious about removing paid links from passing value, this page wouldn’t rank anywhere for the term “SEO.” Take a look at who is linking to the domain and the page and why. There’s so many dozens of visible examples of this “paid network” sort of effect on the web, it’s hard to believe no one’s written an exposé yet (technically, SEOChat is doing the same thing, but they’ve been in the top spot for so many years they’ve earned lots of natural link goodness, too). You know who really should be ranking there? This guy. Yahoo! and Live both have him in the top 10 🙂
After Dave Naylor wrote about this “.com” problem and this search results problem, I figured you’d take the time to figure out what’s going on with it, but wow, still happening. One of those issues is 6 months old!
This is a relevance problem
This is a relevance problem
This is a relevance problem (and a potential copyright violation, but we’ll let Sarah worry about that)
If there are 2.43 million results for this query, why show only up to result 893, even with &filter=0?
OK, I’ve got lots more, but that’s probably enough for tonight. I do, however, have one request for the readers here, though, which is to please go ahead and add your personal gripes on sites you can share in the comments. I think it would be tremendously valuable to see where common issues occur.
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