I noticed this thread on Mastodon exactly where equally John Mueller and Danny Sullivan of Google was encouraging internet legend Tim Bray with some Web optimization troubles he was having with Google Research. Yes, he got two Googlers supporting him, which is rare, but has transpired ahead of.
Tim Bray is famed, well, internet famous, he has a Wikipedia entry that reads, “Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian application developer, environmentalist, political activist and a person of the co-authors of the initial XML specification. He labored for Amazon Internet Services from December 2014 till Could 2020 when he quit because of to fears over the terminating of whistleblowers. Earlier he has been used by Google, Solar Microsystems and Digital Gear Company (DEC). Bray has also launched or co-started various get started-ups these kinds of as Antarctica Units.”
So when an individual web renowned complains about Google – Google notices, nicely, I consider Danny Sullivan at the very least notices.
Tim wrote:
I have noted before that Google is shedding its memory – see https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-shedding-its-memory
It can be finding worse. I was wanting for a web site piece previously this year in which I stated a bicycle accident I might experienced, and remembered that I’d been sporting a Bontrager helmet (advisable BTW) so I searched for “bontrager” through
bontrager website:tbray.org
and Google just can’t find it. DuckDuckGo and Bing can with the actual same string.
Research employed to matter to Google.
So Danny and John stepped in to assistance with some Search engine marketing difficulties with the web site and also saying they will send the feedback to the ideal teams at Google Research.
Danny very first arrived in and seen it and wrote, “If you have an example you want to share in the foreseeable future, content to look. That’s distinctive from us not obtaining indexed a web page — @timbray I see @johnmu gave you a reply on what may well be tripping us up in this scenario”
John then dug in a bit and discovered some troubles, he said:
Hi Tim, I perform with the search people at Google. I took a speedy search right here, and will pass a be aware on internally.
To cut to the chase, what happened listed here is we indexed https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/goto-potd/ from your web site while it was redirecting to your E-Bike post, so we indexed that information underneath the “potd” URL. Then, the contents for “potd” adjusted (I believe this is on design), and we indexed that, and lost the E-bike content material.
There are a couple strategies to take care of this:
– Google could just figure it out and offer with it on their very own. I passed this on, so that we can enhance the units, but it really is a strange edge-scenario, imo.
– block the “potd” URL with robots.txt so that it won’t be able to get picked up by research engines.
– use link-rel-canonical annotations on the specific internet pages so that Google is a lot more very likely to decide on individuals URLs.
If you’d like examples of the final two, satisfied to dig some up.
He then had a little bit of a back and forth on some Seo questions with Tim, all practical for us to review as very well. In this article are some of these responses:
We normally decide on up the robots.txt file about as soon as a day (it is dependent a little bit on the web-site, but due to the fact it is really a static file, we try out to cache it to minimize the load on the server). My guess is by “tomorrow” (relying on timezone :-)), it will stop crawling that.
With indexing of that URL vs the post, I suspect it’s going to acquire more time for the units to comprehend it requirements to re-examine the predicament (I am guessing a week or so, but it truly is unachievable to say).
It can get challenging when our devices assume they have previously seen the written content, just on yet another URL (there is certainly so a lot duplication on the net).
In standard while, it’s rare that we’d index everything from a web-site. This can end result in even webpages closely joined from the homepage not having indexed. I never want to set the expectation that a technically clear web-site will generally have everything in research, since it really is nearly hardly ever the scenario.
Danny also answered some general queries about how Google Search is effective in that thread:
No, we do not deprioritize more mature information (nor was this publish from April 2022 “aged”). We try out to exhibit as substantially beneficial articles as we can. In this individual situation, it is really very likely indexing tripped up for a technical explanation.
We index internet pages. Aged and new. We also rank web pages. Aged and new. In some cases, it can assistance to rank webpages that are fresher, this sort of as if there is certainly a trending concern going on. I believe that commonly helps make sense. This describes far more about how #Google #lookup will make use of freshness in rating.
I do imagine when someone who is net famous, is followed additional and revered extra on line, complains about Google Search, it does get Google’s attention more than a usual man or woman. But at the exact time, it tends to make perception, for the reason that other individuals also comply with them extra and Google, at the very least from a PR point of view, wants to bounce on those people fears right before anyone like me writes it up. Additionally, I assume Danny just follows Tim, so he likely observed it that way anyway.
But yes, getting net renowned doesn’t damage when it will come to getting aid from Google with Search engine optimisation thoughts. It doesn’t suggest Google will push a button to magically make Tim’s internet site rank superior, by the way…
Forum discussion at Mastodon.