Google Sending Spammers to Yahoo!
Note: Be sure to read Matt Cutt’s comments below.
Sure, it is quite an inflammatory title, but hey, I’m a blogger. Anyway, here is the gist. Adam Lasnik gave a speech/session yesterday at Catholic University to assist Government web managers in optimizing their sites. Adam did a great job and it is understandable why Google would want the best SEO’d content to be that created and distributed by Government agencies. Nevertheless, he did let one foible out.
Google doesn’t improve the link: command because they don’t want spammy requests.
That’s right. Even though it is undoubtably useful to good webmasters, they don’t want to spend time, money, or resources making this command more useful because of the millions and millions of automated queries it would solicit.
So, what was Adam’s solution for those at the seminar? Use Yahoo Site Explorer. I never thought I would hear it out of the mouth of a Google employee, but he openly and honestly encouraged participants to visit Yahoo aside from MSN. Crazy.
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Ha ha
I found this extremly funny, but have doubt in Yahoo Site Explorer.
A problem with Yahoo Site Explorer are of course that it doesnt show sites that doesnt allow it to crawl them. This is a problem if someone make bogus search request and similar that they link in.
Another way to say it is that Google shows only a subset of the backlinks that we know of. That subset is enough for most power searchers, librarians, etc.
Adam was trying to give general advice to help government webmasters, not to sell people on Google, so it’s no problem that he mentioned Site Explorer. If someone came up to me and said “I want to know what emoticons mean,” I’d send them to Ask, for example. đ
Well I was the one that actually asked Adam, why the backlink checker on Google doesn’t really work? His actual reply was that the only people who cared about it were SEO people and that ‘less than 4 tenths of a percent of searchers actually use it…’ and that “we have more important things to use our resources on right now and that the backlink checker may be improved soon….
Nothing was mentioned about spammy requests slamming Google with the backlink checker, he reserved that kind of talk for WebPosition Gold, which he essentially deemed as being evil. He told everyone that using it is a great way to get your IP address banned…
As for Adam’s presentation…well let’s just say that this was a pretty safe audience of government webmasters…I left it feeling like Google considered anyone in SEO as the enemy. I think there would have been a lot of disagreements over many of his statements at an SEO conference.
Note: Thanks for your comments. My conclusions were based on the “WebPosition Gold” statements he made. If Google were to improve their link checking tool it would cost time and money + it would only lead to MORE spammy requests. I must disagree about their feeling of “anyone in the SEO as the enemy”. I had a nice discussion with Adam after the meeting and he certainly did not seem to bear any grudge against me. Google certainly has no problem with SEOs who make content more accessible to googlebot.
Nothing new on smiling MiniMe reply.
Adam does not consider Webmasters important to Google and he does not think we are Google customers.
So as he says, “Some taugh love, “take it or leave it!”
The supplementary are not searchable anymore, paid links are evil, link exchanges are evil, PR pixels are ready to go hiden…what is next?
We will need to be certified by Google to have our Website indexed by Google?
IMAO…what will Google serve without us Webmasters? McDonald burgers with Adsense on the wrappings?