Google Admits That Many Of Its Own Sites Fail At SEO
from the telling dept
With all of the recent lawsuits claiming that Google unfairly promotes its own sites and the sites of its partners in search rankings, it's interesting to see that the company has put out an SEO report card that is quite critical of some of its own sites for failing to do some pretty basic search engine optimization practices. While this may be the point that Google is trying to make, it certainly suggests that Google treats its own sites on the same basis as outside sites, contrary to the claims in the lawsuits.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Personally, up until after IE6 came out, aside from maybe Opera, it was hands down the best browser available at the time... at least IMHO. but getting to IE6 involved some underhanded maneuvering. Just the same, that doesn't necessarily mean it should be illegal. It's also not the same to provide a link, or bundle with a product being sold as it is to spend money on physical distribution to force a competitor out of the channel.
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You got this sentence the wrong way round;
"Google treats its own sites on the same basis as outside sites, it['s] certain that this [is] the point that Google is trying to make"
This smacks of a anti-lawsuit PR stunt... not that jurors read the news or anything... ;)
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Site Ranking Fail
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Re: Site Ranking Fail
What made Google's search so successful to begin with was that it was built off of a trust network from cross-linking. SEO just helps Google return relevant pages, the actual ranking in the listing has to do more with the trust level of the site.
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Re: Site Ranking Fail
Google cares more about the relevance of the result than the quality of the product. So, if your website is terrible (in terms of search engine algorithms), but millions of people visit it daily, then you are guaranteed a high ranking for the relevant search topics.
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Yahoo said it best...
So, these lawsuits will never find anything explicitly helping a site. Another example was Google's answer on YouTube. When asked why all of the top video results were from YouTube, Google replied that the video rankings (for the exact same video across multiple sites) is determined by site popularity and YouTube is the most popular video site. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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LOL
In this case though, all I can say is that when I read the report card, I laughed. A lot. because regardless of the reason they came out with the report card, and regardless of the issues that people like to claim are behind such things, it's just ironic in this case. And a great excuse to laugh.
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