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.

Re:Have I missed something?

[njcoder]

Look in the title bar of your browser. There is key word spamming in it.

Re:Could be keyword stuffing...

[JabberWokky]

It's the fact that the title is different when a search engine views it versus when a person views it. Feeding different information to a search engine (with more keywords) is currently frowned upon, as people have abused it.

Check the *title* of the two links. One has a comma separated list of keywords.

--
Evan

Hrmmm

[brunes69]

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?

Re:Could be keyword stuffing...

[Donny Smith]

RTA (http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1774) - the same pages used to be normal, now they're stuffed with keywords.

Re:Only one long term solution:

[theGreater]

You mean dmoz? Or deli.cio.us? Or any other distributed referral system?

-theGreater.

Re:Could be keyword stuffing...

[northcat]

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.

almost definitely *IS* keyword stuffing.

[SirSnapperHead]

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.

Already exists: Nutch

[stripmarkup]

An open-source web search engine [apache.org]. The project has been around for a couple of years and it's backed by Apache.

Does it work for them?

[BlackSoul]

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)

Re:Hrmmm

[NetNifty]

Changes for me. [img44.exs.cx] (Shown with Firefox User Agent Extension settings).

Re:So what?

[poptix_work]

There _is_ _no_ _evil_ here, they index their own internal pages with keywords because it's not going to have sufficient links for pagerank to work normally, It's gone now, it's probably a weekly/monthly process so that searches for AdWords comes up with relevant answers.

Geez, people love Google when they're small, then they start looking for a reason to hate them. This isn't it folks, keep looking.

It's been changed!

[SiliconEntity]

A lot of people are asking, what's going on here? The pages look the same now, but they were different before.

The original article said:

If you look at this Adwords page on Google you'll see at the top of your browser, the title:

Google AdWords Support: How do I use the Traffic Estimator?

That's what normal visitors like you and me will see when visiting the page.

Now have a look at Google's cache of the same page - Notice the change in the title? It now reads:

traffic estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic Google AdWords Support ...

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.

Re:Have I missed something?

[ajs]

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?!

Re:huh?

[Shachaf]

The difference is in the title:
"Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?"
As opposed to
"traffic estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic Google AdWords Support: Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?"

Re:So what?

[gowen]

The validity of this is dependant upon whether Google is a monopoly or not.

It's not.

NEXT!

One important fact left out of the article...

[jdreed1024]

There's just one thing the article and the summary fail to mention:

bash-2.05b$ curl http://adwords.google.co.uk/robots.txt
User-agent : *
Disallow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Allow: /support/
Disallow: /*?
bash-2.05b$

(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?

Re:Grammar Dork Says...

[pclminion]

That should be, "Are Google Breaking Their Own Rules," not "Is Google..."

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.

Re:Grammar Dork Says...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

You actually have to know some grammar to be a grammar dork. "Google" is a collective noun and in this context it is correct to use the singular form even though it is used to represent a collection of people.

Re:Could be keyword stuffing...

[B3ryllium]

That's the point, it doesn't matter. Some editor saw this in the queue, approved it, and thought that it meant Google had been caught with their pants down.

Ever since the IPO, there's been about a 50/50 mix of positive/negative commentary regarding Google - before, it was about 75-80% positive. I get the feeling that some people have their button on the trigger, itching for Google (the "Tech Darling") to make a mistake, so they can be crucified.

Another possible interpretation of this situation is that maybe the keyword-laced page in the cache was simply an earlier version of the existing page - in other words, maybe the whole thing is working exactly like a cache should.

The whole thing is FUD, IMO.

Re:First off

[nemexi]

Funny thing is, Yahoo! uses Google's search engine.

Yahoo used to use Google's search engine. Nowadays it doesn't.

Incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Yahoo dumped Google last year. [com.com]

Re:One thing I'd point out

[WoOS]

And to add to this has anyone actually tried to search for "traffic estimator" [google.com] on google? Surprise, surprise. Their page is not among the top 10 (and I didn't look any further).

Incompetence at Google? Don't even know how to stuff their own search engine? Ah, but maybe it is only for internal search [google.com] (entry number 4 there).

This article smells like either FUD or very bad fact checking.

I checked into this.

[GoogleGuy]

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.