Google Search Is Like Pamela Anderson – Part 2 – The post got a little too large to display correctly in Wordpress, so I had to split it into two parts.
6 – No, It’s What’s Up Front That Counts
Google search seems really intent on indexing every post I make as belonging to my index page. Here, in order, are the Google listings for my last four posts, the oldest of which was made seven days ago and the newest, four days ago.
Is there a pattern here, or is it my imagination?
How many times in a row can Google make the same mistake?
Bingo! A perfect 4 for 4 on mis-indexing posts to the index page!
Even more bizarre, they associate every post with a totally unrelated video file. This has happened about 30 times so far and it’s getting worse, not better. It usually gets resolved in 3 to 4 days, but it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
And yes, I do have a sitemap with the index page weighted at 10% while the individual posts are weighted at 100%.
Heck, I can’t even get Google to read the damn sitemap let alone pay attention to it!
7 – Oh, I Completely Missed That One
Google’s search algorithm suddenly became even stupider and started immediately placing original posts into the omitted results.
Here’s a goofy Miley Cyrus Hannah Montana post (all my posts on this blog are about website traffic, i.e. Google ranking tests) that I made on 02-07-2008:
Why did it get mis-indexed? Because an RSS search engine displayed part of the post and Google equated that snippet display as being the original source.
Eight days later, it still doesn’t show up in a search for the lead sentence:
It took a DMCA compaint filed 2-15-08 to shake that particular post loose from the omitted results. Even Pamela Anderson could have figured it out in less time than that!
8 – Blogspot Is The Mount Olympus Of Blogs
I’m reasonably sure that Pamela Anderson doesn’t believe that, and if that’s the case, she’s a heck of a lot smarter than Google.
Getting spam copies of your posts removed from Blogspot is like pulling teeth. After a couple of dozen painful battles, you don’t even want to go there anymore.
I can make a post and find six copies of it on Blogspot within an hour, yet Google can’t even find my original that all the spam sites are copying. How messed up is that?
9 – Spam? They’re Not Spam! You’re Spam!
But wait, there’s more! Despite massive evidence to the contrary, Google stands by their decision that one of my posts is a copy of one made in 2006.
It doesn’t matter that the original post consisted of one sentence that linked to a photo on another site. Not much in the way of content, but it did include an rss feed so the page always appears fresh to Big G.
Even doing an immediate Digg on the Eva Longoria post right after making it, and then when several copycat versions got indexed instead of my original post, filing a DMCA complaint on 2-15-08 about the copycat posts on Blogspot and elsewhere, and still, I’m the spam copy?
When the dust cleared today, a one-line post from two years ago – with an rss feed included – was deemed by Google to be the original post.
LOL! How messed up is that?
10 – Sitemap? We Don’t Need No Stinking Sitemap!
Just like Pamela Anderson, Google ignores things it doesn’t want to see or hear. Check out this sitemap crawl stat from Google webmaster tools.
As of January 30th, Google hadn’t indexed 60 posts out of 485.
It’s not like our site visitors hated our content or anything like that. As a matter of fact, December was our worst month with visitors saving us as favorites only 57.8% of the time.
Could it be that Google just doesn’t care about blogs that aren’t on Blogspot? Or, maybe they don’t like Wordpress?
Even the lowest level search engineer has to be aware that deep crawling results from a Wordpress blog’s search.php box means they are indexing pages that don’t really exist.
Where’s the vaunted emphasis on the user experience? Does a user really want to land on another search page?
Why are there so many sites in Google’s top 10 that are nothing more than search result aggregators that post links to the content on other sites? Is it because Google’s vaunted universal search results don’t actually provide what users are looking for, so they click on the aggregator-type sites?
Has Google become anti-blog? Did they make a conscious decision to deemphasize blogs by slowing down the crawl rate of blogs and thereby slow the rate at which their posts were indexed?
I noticed in January that our crawl rate stats were abysmal and that traffic from Google was off by 60%, down to a miserable 500k referred visitors.
Yep, that’s a January 31st screenshot showing a last crawl date by Google of January 24th. What’s up with that?
Maybe they just didn’t like it when I poked a little fun at the head honchos back around Thanksgiving time…
I don’t really know for sure, but the sure bet appears to be a badly broken algorithm that nobody at big G seems to have noticed.
Or, then again, maybe they have and they just don’t care…
And those are the Top 10 Ways Google Is Like Pamela Anderson.
Tags: free website traffic, google, google rankings, google search, google search results, google SERPs, pamela anderson, top 10 google rankings, website traffic
February 20th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
This comments obviously works and the RSS feed read correctly.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:52 pm
[...] hitsusa wrote an interesting post today on Google Search Is Like Pamela Anderson – Part 2Here’s a quick excerptGoogle Search Is Like Pamela Anderson – Part 2 – The post got a little too large to display correctly in Wordpress, so I had to split it into two parts. 6 – No, It’s What’s Up Front That Counts. Google search seems really intent on … [...]