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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.
insightful interesting insightful interesting insightful interesting.
just for fun, insert 'Microsoft' in this discussion everytime someone writes 'Google' and see if you feel the same way.
always mosh clockwise
Until there is a free and open search engine, you are beholden to whatever these firms wish to do.
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
They're stuffing results for the internal search here: https://adwords.google.com/support/?hl=en_US
All I see is people talking about how "dumb" they were to use such "obvious" cloaking techniques. Hello people, they were teaching their own search that is to be used on the adwords site. You don't tune your own internal search pages to help people find what they're looking for?
Sounds like a lot of people upset over nothing.
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?!
Next check the robots.txt of their site. First item is Disallow: /search? The evil URL in question is starts with /search? Thus google does not want that page crawled by other websites. How does one stuff keywords on a page they don't want indexed?
(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.
Sounds like a lot of people upset over nothing.
Welcome to the internet!
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.
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.
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"...
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