No sign of improvement for sites having Google indexing problems
June 14, 2006 – 5:43 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This has gone on for a long time. Wait, that’s a bit understated. Troubles with Google’s index have gone on for a long, long, long time. We’re talking months getting ready to slip into years. For years Google maintained a reputation as a company with technical prowess that was unmatched by other companies. Clearly, they are completely outclassed by Yahoo’s offerings when it comes to examing your own website.
Google has had a broken site: command for most of the year, IMHO. It’s extremely common to see:
1) Phantom referrals - you look at your logs, see a referer - but when you investigate, the traffic is already gone - a sure sign of endless Data Center fluxing
2) A massive under-reporting of pages - or even worse non-inclusion
3) Perfectly spiderable pages marked as “supplemental”
The worst case I have is a VBulletin that is spidered all day every day (48,000 occurences of the Gbot in 24 hours) - but has 197,000 pages marked as supplemental.
I’m sure this is all related to the “New PageRank” formula that’s been kept under wraps at Google. The basic idea is, your crawl priority may now be so low that fresh pages from your sites are rarely included in the index. This doesn’t seem to be the type of behavior that the number one global search engine would engage in, but they have been for some time, with no sign of improvement.
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2 Responses to “No sign of improvement for sites having Google indexing problems”
“This doesn’t seem to be the type of behavior that the number one global search engine would engage in, but they have been for some time, with no sign of improvement.”
I agree completely, but what percentage of users will actually notice anything? Google has become so synonymous with SEARCH, that no matter what they serve up the general public will buy it now. They are no longer scrutenized by the average user based on reputation. It’s going to take a ground-swell of webmasters to change the perception. I’ve done my part by removing the google site search from my sites (example at HVAC-Direct (dot) com) and using the yahoo version. Hopefully getting more and more people used to the alternatives. Yahoos results may be easily gamed still, but at least they don’t fluctuate with the winds.
By JLH on Jun 14, 2006
Thanks for the comments.
I agree that the average person won’t notice at all, and Google is a master marketing company. But I do think the perception is beginning to change with webmasters, and that seeps down to the average user.
Google was built by tech people putting them as the homepage for “normal” users. The early adopters loved them and made them into what they are today. They’ve been turning in incompetent performance on the basic crawling issues for awhile, and they keep attempting to push people into their “Sitemaps” program.
By Darren McLaughlin on Jun 14, 2006