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Went Hot: December 14, 2007 - 7:07 am
Posted By: MrThePlague 208 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Google SEO
10 Comments
Went Hot: December 14, 2007 - 7:07 am
Posted By: MrThePlague 208 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Google SEO
10 Comments
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Comments
There's some funny stuff in WebmasterTools.
On the main page, you get a message like ""We last successfully accessed your HomePage on October 20th"", but looking at the cache for the root page, it shows a date from just 3 or 4 days ago. That cache date has also changed about once or twice every week, ever since Google originally found the site a few months ago. That date on the WebmasterTools main page has updated perhaps only once in the last 2 or 3 months.
Google has only found one page of the site, as shown in the SERPs using the site: searches, but the WebmasterTools Crawl Rate page supposedly shows Google pulling between 1 and 5 pages every day. So, all I can think of is that they are accessing the root page up to 5 times per day. However as noted above, they say elsewhere that they haven't looked at it for over six weeks. There's a discrepency in there somewhere.
There's no canonical issue going on with the site. Only www.example.com/ can be directly accessed. All other versions (non-www, named index pages, URLs with parameters, etc), get a 301 redirect back to www.example.com/ and only www.example.com/ has ever been promoted in any incoming external links.
I also noticed this today: ""Your site's domain (.GB) is already associated with the country/region: United Kingdom."". The domain isn't ".gb", it is ".uk".
That "We last successfully accessed your HomePage on October 20th" is just pathetic. They should remove it if they can't get on the same page with reality, I'd rather have no information than bad information.
But they are adding new features at a pretty good pace.
Thanks for the write-up, Vanessa! Just wanted to clarify that we don't currently have Googlers monitoring the new Help Groups (Hungarian and Czech), but we'll keep an eye on the traffic levels and may get some Googlers in there as activity warrants.
Those duplicate title tag and duplicate meta description tag features look remarkably similar to my Website Health Check tool that Google recently blocked.
At least they now offer those features, but a thank you / credit / attribution link would have been nice.
Its really funny you say that Aaron - I was thinking the EXACT same thing when I looked at it for the first time. I was actually going to mention something in the description to regards to it, but I didn't want to start an inner stellar war :P
We regards to the Website Health Check; Its still in Google so its hardly banned.
I think these new development are very good the more formats we can proactively get indexed the better; I only wish Yahoo and Live would follow the developments of G but they seem to be stuck in first gear.
Hi Andy
Being banned and having them block your tool are two different things.
Aaron, people have asked us to do checks like this for years. Who did you talk to at a search conference?
As far as blocking, we have denial-of-service servers that run completely automatically. They turn off IPs that scrape Google too heavily. Every major search engine does this (e.g. Yahoo sends a "999 status code" when they block people that search/scrape too fast), so I wouldn't chalk this up to a person at Google doing anything deliberately.
I don't remember ever visiting your tool Aaron, so I just checked it out, and saw
"Warning: The launch of this tool was so successful that Google ended up blocking it, and added its features to Google Webmaster Central. And they didn't even have the manners or decency to attribute the idea to this site."
Uh, okay. Just to re-iterate:
1. People have been asking us to add more diagnostic information to the webmaster console for years. Heck, one of the first things I asked the webmaster console team was to add more "self-diagnosis" tools, and that was in November 2005, a full two years before you launched your tool.
2. If Google blocked your tool, it's almost certain that it was our algorithmic denial-of-service servers simply detecting what looked like scraper-like or automatic queries to us.
3. To the best of my knowledge, no one on the webmaster tools team had even looked at your "health check" tool.
4. Google's new features do a ton of completely new/different things. Stuff like long and short titles, non-informative titles, long and short meta descriptions, and issues where content couldn't be indexed.
5. The only overlap I saw between your tool and the webmaster console was duplicate/missing titles/descriptions, which seems like a pretty normal thing to check for. I just poked around some, and http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/titlechecker.pl also lets you type in a site and see titles. And according to http://www.seomoz.org/tools they've got a tool to "quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website - it examines title tags, http response codes, cache dates and presence in the search engine indexes."
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you assume that the webmaster console folks copied? They came up with a ton of things that your tool doesn't check for, so why would you assume that missing/duplicate title/descriptions came from your tool? People complained for a long time that duplicate descriptions could affect site: queries, so that's a very natural thing for the engineers to add, especially because it's so easy to check for.
And if your tools gets blocked by Google, why would you assume that a person did that? Our servers block scraping often enough that we did a blog post about it this summer: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/07/reason-behind-were-sorry-message.html which even mentioned "Overly aggressive SEO ranking tools may trigger this message, too." That is, Google does block a lot of scraping algorithmically. Why not go with Occam's razor on this one, instead of assuming that Google is working to block you specifically and steal your ideas?
"The launch of this tool was so successful that Google ended up blocking it, and added its features to Google Webmaster Central."
Aaron, I don't understand why you insisnt on jumping to conclusions. You did that before and you were proven wrong. Publishing suspicion as fact just makes you look like a boy who cried wolf.