Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Is Google Breaking Their Own Rules?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-than-a-little-fishy dept.

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.

4 of 552 comments (clear)

  1. One thing I'd point out by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The keywords Google added to their title are limited in number and relevant to the actual page. This is rather different from the practice of a lot of SEOs of stuffing with several dozens of keywords and stuffing keywords that have nothing to do with the content of the page itself. And I notice that a lot of the SEOs squawking about this issue are among the worst offenders for high-volume irrelevant-keyword stuffing. Something to think about.

  2. Re:Brittant Spears by Juiblex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually they really did it... I got the list from Google itself =p

    http://labs.google.com/britney.html

  3. Re:So what? by Dr.+Zed · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I don't think Google should give preference to their own pages in their search engine.

    The page was a google cache page. Have you ever been served a google cache page as part of a Google search? I am fairly certain I haven't so I don't believe that this page would be a 'preference' in their search engine.

    Second, does anyone have ANY evidence that this page only has the keywords in the title BECAUSE it is cached. This could very easily be what the page WAS when it was cached, and someone changed the title at some point.

    The whole article sounds like FUD to me.

    By the way, to quickly get to a Google cache, try this bookmarklet:
    NAME:
    ::Google Cache for this page
    LOCATION:
    javascript:document.location.href= 'http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:' +document.location.href.replace(/http:\/\//,'')

  4. Agreed. by Mr+Z · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yup. Looks to me like they're using the technique internally to file things orderly, since they're generating content that directly populates the database. The nice, handy newline between the keywords and the actual title in the HTML source also makes it trivial for scripts to strip it out later. If they were trying to hide something, they'd teach their cacher to delete the "secret" keywords.

    In contrast, for ad hoc "discovered" content, such as what a web spider crawling the rest of the web might find, such practices are hardly benign. Google can trust its own vision of how it wants its database to look, but not the intentions Mr. XXX HardCore Anal Sluts, or the guy that has Ad0be Ph0t0sh0p for 75% off, or worse yet, the guy who wants to "verify your account-holder information"...

    --Joe
    --
    Program Intellivision!