| Title: | Googlebot Gets Smarter |
| URL: | http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/01/07/googlebot-gets-smarter/ |
| Printed: | November 21, 2008 |
| Source: | The Rimm-Kaufman Group Blog, info@rimmkaufman.com |
- January 7, 2007
- 3 comments
Multiple reports from the SEO blogosphere (Ekstreme, Cre8asite) report that the Google spider is starting to slurp external CSS and javascript files to cut down on “black hat SEO tricks”. Hurrah!
It seems the Disney blog was among those that got dinged for having invisible text, getting delisted from Google on Friday January 5th. But being Disney has its advantages — Matt Cutts himself showed up the next day, Saturday, to give help and offer a reinclusion request.
Marketing take-aways:
- Long term, “white hat” SEO will win. That means: content, links, writing, brand, and clean markup will win. Google has the resources to stamp down black-hat SEO tricks, and they will.
- Google continues to improve their technology, relentlessly, on both the paid and organic side.
- Google is responsive to Big Brands. Yes, these are the folks with the largest Adwords spends, true. But the Bid Brands also have the sites that most web users want to reach, so making sure they’re in the Google index correctly is an important aspect to usability.
- Google couldn’t reach Disney to discuss this problem, and so acted unilaterally a week later. (Quoting from Matt’s comment: “We tried to email you; sorry if the emails didn’t reach you. We’re looking for ways to improve our communication more this year e.g. via Google’s webmaster console . I’ll include the email that we sent to contact@, info@, support@, and webmaster@ your domain on 12/29/2006 at 10:11:31″.) Question: can Google reach you? Make sure you have good contact info in the webmaster console, and have a real human keep an eye on “contact@yourbrand.com” and “webmaster@yourbrand.com”.
- Big Brands: use reputable SEO practices, whether in-house or through a reputable agency. Don’t, don’t, three-times-repeat don’t resort to games that can tarnish your brand. And if you encounter difficulty, reach out to Google, if need be through your paid ad reps — they do want their engine to do the right thing, and they will help if they can.
All good news to large, reputable advertisers. Glad to see Google continues to head in the right direction on these issues.
Update:
Missed it on first reading — this isn’t Disney’s blog, it is a fan blog: “The Disney Blog and The Disney Blog: Kid’s World are not affiliated with The Walt Disney Company in any way.”
So these folks aren’t massive Adwords spenders — makes Matt’s reach-out even more impressive, in my opinion!
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Hey. Thanks for posting about The Disney Blog’s troubles. As you point out, it’s really just a fan run blog. Disney doesn’t have a public blog where they track all this stuff. It would be nice if they did, but I try and fill in as best I can.
I have never tried any SEO tricks for The Disney Blog (being a blog that covers a very specific topic gets me ranked high enough in Google as it is) and since I’m not using the ‘advanced templates’ on Typepad, I can’t add any meta-tags. I was trusting that Typepad’s code met Google Quality Standards. I don’t think even Typepad was aware that it didn’t. So this tells me it was possibly some recent change in Googlebot’s behavior (as you pointed out). Perhaps Webmaster tools should also allow you to add a site description and prohibit the googlebot from accessing certain directories there, since not all website owners have access to the robot.txt file, even on Google’s on googlepages tools.
Your point about having the webmaster@domain.name email set up is important. It did not get the Google email as I thought publishing a contact email on my blog would be enough for Google, turns out it wasn’t. But I did keep an eye on the webmaster tools panel. It would be nice if the same time Google sends out the one-week warning, they also highlight the offending blog in the webmaster tools (and google analytics if that’s being used too) and then also sending the email to the account used to configure either of those tools. I think that would cover all the bases.
Thanks again for posting about my Saga. I’ve posted a summary with lessons learned at the blog if you’re interested.
http://www.thedisneyblog.com/tdb/2007/01/google_delistin.html
-John
I do not believe this