Google indexes trash and “supplementals” above original content
Google continues its on-going trend to suck ass by ranking verbatim reprints of my feed by ‘myFeedz‘ higher than the original posts at this site. In fact, Google is now even ranking pages with only links to my posts higher than my actual posts even when I search for the post title as a phrase.
First step, I thought, would be to send a nice letter to myFeedz:
How can I have my feed removed from myFeedz? Or.. rather, how can I have my articles being reproduced verbatim on your site?
I have no problem with it personally, but Google does, and now all my pages are disappearing, only to be replaced with your reprints of them which is obviously “not good”
You can e-mail me at XXXX@gmail.com
Second step, though, is to record my thoughts that the Google search engine is rapidly becoming a piece of useless crap only good for indexing ripped off content. Google has indexed my posts up until about the last week, yet when I do a verbatim search for “The Markov Manifesto” (the title of a post I made almost a month ago), I get these results:
All but the last two results are complete trash, and even the last two aren’t the original post. This is pretty crazy considering my site is a PR 7 and all the ones above me are Supplementals! I can repeat this experiment for most of my posts, even those where the original post actually comes up. In some situations my posts come first, quite why it varies this way is a mystery to me.
All respect to the wonderful people at Google who, I am sure, are mostly pretty great engineers, but I think those swimming pools, pool tables, and dogs running around the workplace are screwing with their management’s decision-making processes by making fine engineers work on total crap rather than improving their core business of search.
December 28th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Wouldn’t it be because people are linking to the myFeedz page and not your own one? Just a thought
December 28th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
But I don’t see why anyone would (at least, naturally). My original ones tend to get the real links, and I think the links to the MyFeedz pages are just internal ones (as are mine, naturally). Google is meant to be able to detect ‘duplicate content’ and it’s reasonably easy to detect mine is the original, since even MyFeedz link back to it
December 29th, 2006 at 10:58 am
IMHO, Google as an email service is fantastic; Google as an advertising service is fantastic; Google as a search engine died about a month or two ago, it is utterly useless for searching. Pretty much any search will return a dozen spam sites, half a dozen re-linking sites and two actual links, usually at the bottom. What you’re seeing with your content is not unusual, it is very much the norm on Google now. How lame.
So, when are you going to build Boogle?
December 29th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Might not have to
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/23/wikipedia-to-launch-searchengine-exclusive-screenshot/
January 10th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Peter,
You might be glad to know that your blog entry is now back at the top of the search results on Google for “The Markov Manifesto”. The trash / supplementals (including one of my own Rails projects tralwr.com) are now further down.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Yeah, I was happy to see this a week or so ago, and this site is ranking in Google.co.uk pretty well generally now. On Google.com, however, it’s screwed.. for “peter cooper” it’s down at #27! It was at #1 for a couple of years.