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Is Google Breaking Their Own Rules?
flood6 writes "Threadwatch is carrying a story about Google getting caught doing things they ban other websites for. Here is a page as viewed by the public and the same page as viewed by a search engine (their cache)." Note that the titles in the cache are employing classic keyword stuffing, presumably to improve rankings.
Check the *title* of the two links. One has a comma separated list of keywords.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Tools -> Chrange browser Identification -> Other -> Googlebot.
Nope... no change here.
Isn't it possible that the TITLE entry in the google cache database got corrupted for this page?
Did you even READ TFA? Google gives different pages for users and its own search engine. The user's pages are NOT stuffed with keywords, while the ones for its search engine are. This is OBVIOUSLY keyword stuffing and cloaking.
There _is_ _no_ _evil_ here, they index their own internal pages with keywords because it's not going to have sufficient links for pagerank to work normally, It's gone now, it's probably a weekly/monthly process so that searches for AdWords comes up with relevant answers.
Geez, people love Google when they're small, then they start looking for a reason to hate them. This isn't it folks, keep looking.
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
The original article said:
But now, the links point to a different page. It is no longer about "Google AdWords Support: How do I use the Traffic Estimator?". Now the page is, "Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?" It's a completely different page on a completely different topic. And for this page, there is no difference between the cached and direct views.
That's why people are scratching their heads.
I don't know whether Google did this to cover up their actions when they got caught, or whether it was a simple and routine rebuild of their help database which caused page numbers to change so that the links no longer point to where they did before.
This is NOT keyword spamming.
Keyword spamming is when you put UNRELATED keywords in the title or "keywords" headers of a page.
For example, if your page is a pile of ads for random stuff and your keywords are "tequila, mp3, oscars", then that's keyword spam. Putting the keywords in the title was a way to get around anti-keyword spamming techniques for a while. Many have said that putting keywords in the title is a bad thing because it results in unreadable titles, which is true.
Google has no circumvented that by putting readable, usable titles in the pages served to users and relevant, but verbose titles in pages served to crawlers... and this is related to keyword spamming how?!
(Try it yourself if you don't believe me)
What that says is "Prevent any user agent from indexing anything below the root hierarchy, unless it's Googlebot, and then only allow the root level and /support/"
So, no other search engines should ever be seeing this page. Basically, Google is using their own search engine to also index their own support information. And this is a problem because.... why?
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Sure, that agrees now, but it still sounds bad. "Google are really cool!" WTF? Just because a corporation consists of multiple people doesn't mean it's plural. The headline should have been, "Is Google Breaking Its Own Rules?"
Oddly, this is the ONLY thing I get pedantic about when it comes to grammar.