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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.
For now, the implications are simple - If Google can do this on it's own pages, why can ordinary webmasters not? Google's keyword stuffed, cloaked title would be hard to describe as anything other than an SEO tactic not so much frowned upon, but full on hated by the Search giant itself.
Why? Because it's their site and they are in no need to follow their own rules. They aren't going to ban themselves but they will ban you. If you want to be listed on *the* search engine then follow their rules. If you don't care if anyone finds you then you can modify your page during crawler indexing and other sites can pick you up.
Or it could just be lousy technical writing and lousy editing. Sure, the word is repetitive, but never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.
But, you, they're allowed to. They're their own rules. They can make rules, and change rules, and ignore rules as they see fit.
Don't like it? Find another search engine (no longer as hard or as painful as it used to be).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
insightful interesting insightful interesting insightful interesting.
Congress is the only one around here who gets to pass laws in the hypocritical fashion, e.g. labor laws.
You're not trying to imply Google is leveraging itself into the government, are you? That's ++L++R territory!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
just for fun, insert 'Microsoft' in this discussion everytime someone writes 'Google' and see if you feel the same way.
always mosh clockwise
Using their own site to promote themselves. Pretty sure that's ok. They ARE offering this service to the entire world for free. What would the internet be without Google?
If they write the software, they can automatically rank their own pages however they wish. It's not hard to check what site the page came from.
Until there is a free and open search engine, you are beholden to whatever these firms wish to do.
I want to get spam. As a citizen of the united states it is my right to receive spam. Who are you to deny this right of me? I hope George Washignton Bush will protect my right and fight the terrorists who want to stop spam getting to me.
Telemarketers too.
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.
News at 11 ! Google is promoting themselves on their own website!
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?
...this means when I search google.....for things related to google, google pages will make it higher in the search results?!?!
I feel so betrayed!
Is it just irony that the example is on a "Adwords" page.
Are there other examples out there?
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
just in order to have high rankings on the other search engines...
Are they suggesting that google has to resort to keyword stuffing on cached pages to get a higher ranking on their own search engine? Is it me or is this unbelievably stupid? Surely, if they wanted too, they could just have their own pages rank top of whatever searchs they wanted- keywords or no keywords? Just some find of google flag in the ranking algorithm and they'd be done.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
It's also done globally as the article pointed out. Sneaky sneaky google.
(This still isn't evil by googles definition because "Evil is what Sergey says is evil." and this tactic propably adds some additional millions of dollars to Sergeys pocket)
My quality social news site.com.
Google doesn't need to stuff keywords for their own site - they could make their own Adwords page the only thing you ever see if you search for "traffic estimator." And why should Google care about stuffing keywords for Yahoo or Microsoft's earch engines? They don't control what you do for other search engines, either (if Google knew that your site only keyword-stuffed for MSN and Yahoo crawlers, would they care? No, they'd probably high-five you for screwing with their competitors' relevancy). There's no hypocrtical behavior here.
I see folk getting their panties in a twist shouting "mountain!" while pointing at a mole hill.
Their next step is to put on bottom of google.com front page, in font size 1, white foreground on white background:
"britney spears
brittany spears
brittney spears
britany spears
britny spears
briteny spears
britteny spears
briney spears
brittny spears
brintey spears
britanny spears
britiny spears
britnet spears
britiney spears
britaney spears
britnay spears
brithney spears
brtiney spears
birtney spears
brintney spears
briteney spears
bitney spears
brinty spears
brittaney spears
brittnay spears
britey spears
brittiny spears
brtney spears
bretney spears
britneys spears
britne spears
brytney spears
breatney spears
britiany spears
britnney spears
britnry spears
breatny spears
brittiney spears
britty spears
brotney spears
brutney spears
britteney spears
briyney spears
bittany spears
bridney spears
britainy spears
britmey spears
brietney spears
brithny spears
britni spears
brittant spears
bittney spears
brithey spears
brittiany spears
btitney spears
brietny spears
brinety spears
brintny spears
britnie spears"
The title of the page is "traffic, estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic Google Adwords Support:..."
You can't seriously attribute that to lousy technical writing or editing?
It's Google's site so I don't see why they can't up their pages in rankings. They should have just used a transparent mechanism for doing it instead of using the techniques they ban others from using. That's where they haven't been smart - just be honest and treat certain Google pages like advertised links.
It's the year of Linux! To celebrate I have x free hotmail accounts to give away
Google's business model DOES NOT rely on trapping users and forcing - practically blackmailing - it's victims to make exorbant payments for upgrades, Google DOES NOT have a death grip monopoly on the consumer Search Engine market, and the page in question does not further any political, social, business, economic, or other goals.
Is it shifty and underhanded? Indeed, but Google has had a history of being a benign company, and as such do not deserve the same treatment as an actively malicious company.
By the same logic which you have applied here, what would you be feeling if the names "Mother Teresa" and "Osama Bin Laden" were transposed?
Searching for "search engine" only brings up google in 5th place. They're certainly doing a shoddy job of being unfair.
If it was MS (if you use msn search or whatever their search engine is) made their products come out on top using such tactics then everyone would be trying to join the lynch mob. However if google does it its fine.
What I do find interesting is that they needed the keywords, and didn't just raise their rank artificially. Does the google algorithm not have such a feature in it (or not have it easily accessible)? Potentially it does but google chose to not use it. In either case this is nicer than what I'd see other companies doing in such a case, since I doubt they'd bother with keywords on their own search engine.
I don't get it. The two pages look the same to me.
Is it the highlighting? They always do that for pages that you find in the cache.
I think this is actually handy. Google is simply altering the title "with the keywords you searched for". So that you can see the Google cache page in your title bar without seeing "Google cache", blah.
I don't see this as anything sneaky just something to help people. Why would Google want to alter the page rank of a cached page anyways?
Seems like a post to grab some hits on http://www.threadwatch.org/
Lame
An open-source web search engine. The project has been around for a couple of years and it's backed by Apache.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Has anyone actually checked to see if they actually have lifted the rules for their own pages? I mean really, just because they did this on their own pages, does it mean they aren't getting the same mark down as everyone else? Does google really need to worry about any of their pages loosing a foothold in their own searches, they are LISTED ON THE FRONT PAGE! If I were google, I'm not sure I would worry about search position for a page I have linked on the front page of the search engine. :o)
Revolutionary Discontent
You pop caught you smoking, and he said, "No way!"
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day.
Google bans google webpages from google search engine.
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.
Begin using other engines and break the homogenization of the search engine market. We are better off with competition and multiple viable search services.
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?!
Criticism of something is now a "witchhunt?"
No, it's called objectively examining your beliefs in order to make sure they're valid. If they are, there's no problem.
Unconditional praise all the time would be truly evil. Google controls a lot of the web.
I am not sure that it is true. But leaving that aside, Google does not have a monopoly esp one that is forced or supported by illegal methods. They are large, but they do not really control the industry. Yahoo carries a lot more weight than others credit them for. When Google fails to pick up something relavent then I go to Yahoo.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
(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.
After all, they're not censoring this from their pages
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"Well, Microsoft has been identified as a monopolist, so they have to play by a different set of rules."
I see people trot out this line every single time someone suggests that Microsoft be allowed something resembling the rights of other corporations. It's a broad, sweeping statement which essentially says that since Microsoft was designated a monopolist, the government can arbitrarily restrict their practices as they see fit, with barely adequate explanations.
It's also completely irrational. Yes, Microsoft was identified as a monopolist. The result? They've had to change some of their practices and submit themselves to an increased level of oversight from various government institutions. It does not mean that they have given up all normal, reasonable corporate rights that are in the possession of every other company. The vitriolic hatred for Microsoft on Slashdot makes some people think that any restriction on Microsoft is a good one - that they should be hampered in the course of normal business as much as possible, and screw any idea of fairness. Some might say that this was only justice, since Microsoft presumably didn't allow fairness to competitors and that's why they were convicted. Well, it may fit your personal sense of justice, but legally it's not. The legal system has already meted out its brand of justice, which, materially, is the only one that matters. And the legal system didn't say that Microsoft must be obstructed in business whenever possible, at every turn. They still retain the right to play by established legal rules - and, being a paranoid, highly successful company, they're going to exploit those wherever they can. You might not like it, but it's their right.
The coolest voice ever.
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.
"I'm a Google fanboy and will accept and justify it when they're hypocritical. I'll blame the criticism on them being popular."
More to the point: ignorning the fact that this is google sending keywords to google; ignoring the fact that this their site and they can do whatever they want; ignoring the fact that people are using words like "evil" to describe something that affects exactly no one; ...
The key point here is relevancy. The keywords are relevant and accurate. You might say that this breaks Google's style guidelines, and that's a good reason for them to bug-fix it. But, I fail to see how this is some great transgression on Google's part. This is USEFUL INFORMATION that they are putting in the title. Ugly, sure. I hate when eBay does the same thing. It's still not keyword spam, and it's still not cloaking. Cloaking is when you pretend to the search engine that you're a different kind of site so that you get ranked in with that kind of site. It's not putting keywords in ugly user-visible places when they are relevant.
Please return to your useless ranting about Microsoft or something.
Long answer: the title of the accused page includes words that were used in the search query. You searched for the words "traffic estimate". You got a page about traffic estimates. Google used those words, as well as similar words, to find you a page. It's called stemming. It's how search engines work.
So you get a page in the cache where their title includes words used in the search. These words don't actually appear in the normal page. You also got a blurb at the top of the page saying "This is Google's cache..." That doesn't appear on the normal page either. So what the hell are you trolling about?
You may just have won non-story-of-the-week.
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"...
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
It's not a case of showing different results to other search engines. It's a case of showing different results to just themselves only. It doesn't affect Yahoo or MSN search - they still see the same page everyone else does.
Google's complaint with other websites is, basicly, "When we hit your site, please show us the same thing you show everyone else." Thus they aren't breaking their own rule, because they ARE doing that to the other search engines out there. They are only 'lying' to themselves.
Let's say MSN did the same thing, and rendered keyword-stuffed results for their own searches on their own sites, but still showed the same page to all external visitors, treating google no differently than an interactive user. Then it wouldn't harm Google's search in the slightest (and in fact google's search would end up being better than MSN's search on their own site because it wouldn't be tainted by the keyword stuffing). Similarly, what google did doesn't harm the other search engines in the slightest, and in fact makes them a tiny sliver more accurate than google is.
No, this is not the same thing that they are complaining about. They don't mind in the slightest if other search engines lie to themselves, so long as they don't lie to google, and google can lie to itself so long as it doesn't lie to other search engines.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I don't know, but apparently our editors isn't editing. Guess that's because our children isn't learning though.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
No, Yahoo dumped Google last year.
If google really wanted to boost their own pagerankings, why go to the trouble of making keywords for specific pages? Wouldn't it be easier to tweak the algorithm so that google pages automatically get a certain number of points (or however they do it) bonus?
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Whoever has lots of bread, doesn't have to eat shit.
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We inadvertently showed additional information on product support pages to both Google's site search crawler and Google's main web crawler. The additional information shown on the product support pages was intended only for the site search crawler, not the main web crawler. They're in the process of changing it so that the pages show only same the information that users get.