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Weird Results from Google

Posted on February 16, 2007
Filed Under Diary |

 I’m summarising this story right at the top because it turned into a long, rambling, ranting kind of thing… who’s got the time to read it?

One of my blogs — Bali Belly — has yet to show up properly indexed in Google even though it’s been there a couple of years. And, believe me, I followed all the right steps at the start… content is king, friendly urls, pinging updates, technorati… all of that jazz. What do I get. Nada in Google and a decent indexing in Yahoo (if you pick the correct combination of twenty or so words to build up a complex search phrase with quotes around it).

So here I am, this morning, trying to organise my new server (I just moved away from my old host) and setting up a play domain where I can try stuff out — Indonesia Woodcraft — without ruining my business and, just for the heck of it, I searched indonesia woodcraft in Yahoo — nothing except an obscure reference towards one of the test pages on Indonesia Export but the same phrase in Google… first place. It’s actually indexed. Even the phrasing is indexed.

WTF?

I don’t know whether to jump for joy or just toss my laptop out the window.

[Here’s the full article]

I’ve got a few websites to my name… nothing strange about that — I’ve been consistently online since Netscape 1.1 was the bee’s knees and Fetch was fading into a distant memory.

For the past ten years or so, most of my time has been taken up with one domain in particular — Indonesia Export. If she was a lady, she’d be my main squeeze but, truthfully, she’s no lady… she’s my business and behind the (even if I do say so myself) glossy blue veneer, there lies a sprawling building, staff sitting at computers, team of guys in the warehouse and network of carvers all across Indonesia.

So, this domain, Indonesia Export, is my company. The dot com aspect is my lead generator, my forum, my 24/7 tv ad.

I’ve been running the ad for ten years and, during that time, the site has changed and grown.

I started on a Mac (Powerbook 5300 with a crappy screen); I made the HTML with BBEdit (I wonder if that’s still around… probably is) and the uploaded the static pages via FTP — at that time, in Bali, a painfully slow process: 14.4 kb if you were damned lucky.

Then I switched to Homesite.

Then Dreamweaver which I still use.

Along the way, I ditched static for dynamic (no more copy & paste) and jumped into MySql.

And, the site was always there in the search engines. Yahoo first… I don’t remember Google at all in the early days. Just Yahoo and maybe AltaVista.

As the years went by, the site grew in size (2 Gigs+ of images; BIG database) and competitors arrived.

The competition changed from just one or two websites in the Yahoo index to, well, many…

Then the arms race began.

At first, it was fairly easy to control — there were only a few sites and the competition was about who had the most products, the best pictures, the most frequent updates and the best prices. Tough but not impossible. Fair, you might say.

We watched what our competitors did. Held meetings. Compared pricing. Tried to keep everything in line. We didn’t go out there to beat every price but just checked regularly to ensure we didn’t look silly.

More domains and companies arrived. More price checks. Different presentations, different concepts. We adapted and we stayed towards the top of the search engines.

Then, we dropped out completely. Gone. Business slowed to a crawl (at least from the website end). I scratched my head (boy, I wish I hadn’t — I’m 36 now and there’s nothing left on top) and did a little research…

…META TAGS — damn meta tags — does anyone else remember that unholy mess? Ok, the idea was straight-forward… you bury a bunch of data into the code of a standard HTML page. This buried data tells the search engine spider (why do they call them spiders?) who made the page, what it is about, what the key words are… etc.

Problem for me, at that point, was that if you didn’t have meta tags there already, you had to go back, edit your pages and re-upload (on a 14.4 connection).

Then people started abusing the system and everybody threw up their hands to say, “Damn these people for abusing the system.” I also threw up my hands at the same time but, if I remember correctly, it was to say, “Finally, people are abusing the system — took them long enough.” I mean, is there any system in history that hasn’t been abused?

I guess the biggest irritation with the MetaTag system was that people and businesses with little or no experience could reach the top of the engines almost immediately. All that time I’d spent… all those hours; all those images… and then back to square one. Well, whatever: business is partly about adaptation. Not a crisis but an opportunity. We did our tags and reappeared in the engines. Excellent.

Shortly after that, we dropped out again.

Turns out the rules had changed and our tags were not good enough.

Re-did the tags and reappeared in the engines. Excellent.

And dropped out again — tags were no longer a factor.

New terms appeared… word density and blah, blah, blah and then I found out Google wouldn’t follow into frames or past question marks (this has since changed) but did I have at that particular time? Right: a 2 gigabyte website based on mysql and php (question marks everywhere you look) in a framed format. Bollocks.

Then came Pay-per-click and blogging. So, we switched to pay-per-click and blogging. That means, I pay x hundred bucks a month to talk with 3 or 4 people and my blogs rarely if ever show up close to the top in a search engine where I want them.

Why? Abuse. We’ve all come full circle to trying every trick we can to put ourselves at the top and the whole system has turned full circle so that the usual suspects end up on top of the pile but legitimate businesses end up wasting considerably more money and time to compete with them.

Brilliant. Thank you Google. Thank you Yahoo. Kisses.

So, I bought a few more domains, set up a few more blogs, wasted one hell of a lot more time (on search engines rather than new products) just so people can find our handicrafts when they’re looking for them.

Meanwhile, every day, I see yet another website domain coming online (usually using our pictures, our text or some part of what we do) and coming up ahead of us. Enough to make a grown man tear out his hair in frustration (been there, done that, got the Google t-shirt).

One of my blogs — Bali Belly — has yet to show up properly indexed in Google even though it’s been there a couple of years. And, believe me, I followed all the right steps at the start… content is king, friendly urls, pinging updates, technorati… all of that jazz. What do I get. Nada in Google and a decent indexing in Yahoo (if you pick the correct combination of twenty or so words to build up a complex search phrase with quotes around it).

So here I am, this morning, trying to organise my new server (I just moved away from my old host) and setting up a play domain where I can try stuff out — Indonesia Woodcraft — without ruining my business and, just for the heck of it, I searched indonesia woodcraft in Yahoo — nothing except an obscure reference towards one of the test pages on Indonesia Export but the same phrase in Google… first place. It’s actually indexed. Even the phrasing is indexed.

WTF?

I don’t know whether to jump for joy or just toss my laptop out the window.

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