NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] The Google Search "Secrets" in Plain View
The Google Search "Secrets" in Plain View
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000732.html
Greetings. As I've mentioned previously, I tend to receive several
hundred e-mails daily that relate to Google one way or another, many
of which contain requests for advice regarding perceived or real
Google-related issues. I try to help when I can.
( http://bit.ly/bOXhR0 [Lauren's Blog] )
And my concerns about what I consider to be significant shortcomings
in Google's user communications structure -- especially when dealing
with relatively unusual or serious problems -- are fairly well known.
( http://bit.ly/d0Zp10 [Lauren's Blog] )
But recent calls for regulatory oversight of Google Search
( http://bit.ly/c11dTV [ New York Times] ) are way off-base, and --
beyond the obvious First Amendment concerns -- threaten to undermine
Google's efforts to provide the best possible natural (organic,
algorithmic) search results via Google's continuing work to avoid
distortions in or gaming of those results.
The fact that Google permits highly controversial search results to
maintain algorithmically determined high rankings, even when it would
be much easier from a public relations standpoint for Google to
suppress those results, are another indication of Google's laudable
efforts not to disrupt natural results rankings with manual
alterations ( http://bit.ly/aRAujU [Google] ).
It's notable that in all of the countless cases where people have come
to me (sometimes utterly convinced that Google has a vendetta against
them) with complaints about their Web site "vanishing" from Google
listings or not achieving the kind of result rankings that they felt
were deserved, I've never once seen a case where any unfair or
unreasonable actions by Google were actually in play in the situation.
In fact, in virtually all of these cases the problems have boiled down
to one of two issues.
The first is that the sites have become contaminated with malware,
often without the site owners' knowledge. This can result in Google
quite reasonably flagging the sites as potentially dangerous to users,
with resulting undesirable (but completely appropriate under the
circumstances) effects. Even when site owners protest that their
sites are clean, on closer inspection it turns out (in my experience)
that their sites have been compromised in some manner.
An even more common case is that sites have not been organized in ways
that make it possible for Google to effectively crawl their contents,
or the sites include elements (often at the urging of unscrupulous
SEO -- "Search Engine Optimization" -- firms), that violate the site
guidelines Google has established to help avoid gaming of results to
the detriment of Google's users overall.
There isn't anything intrinsically evil about SEO per se. In fact --
and here come those secrets in plain view that I promised -- Google
has put major efforts into making available absolutely comprehensive
resources and tools for webmasters, yet it appears that many or most
Web site owners don't even realize that these exist.
Google's Webmaster Central ( http://bit.ly/9CWNVn [Google] ) is a
universe of information, tools, video tutorials, and all manner of
other resources that webmasters can use to better understand how
Google crawls their sites, potential problems in sites; mechanisms to
inform Google how sites are organized to enable efficient and complete
crawling of text, video, and other formats; ways to gather metrics on
how people discover sites; and so much more.
Over on YouTube, the Google Webmaster Central Channel
( http://bit.ly/dmiYGK ) contains hundreds of videos on related topics
that should be of interest to anyone running a Web site, including
many Q&A videos from Matt Cutts who heads up Google's "Webspam"
team -- which is directly involved in these sorts of search quality issues
(he's also a good guy -- I recommend paying attention to his
suggestions!)
All of this isn't to assert that every problem anyone may have with
Google will be solved via these Google resources -- nor to say that
effective means to solving every other possible sort of Google-related
problem necessarily even currently exists.
But for many common situations -- the kind where people may feel that
Google is unfairly ranking their site -- or similar scenarios -- I
believe that a reasoned analysis of the circumstances, especially in
conjunction with the Google Webmaster Resources discussed above, will
demonstrate that Google bends over backwards not only to keep their
natural search results rankings as useful and honest as possible, but
also that Google has worked very hard to explain how to optimize sites
for best results -- and has provided tools to help make this as
straightforward and painless as possible for webmasters.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)
http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance):
http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz