Is Google Broken

SEO Google

Google Problems

I see it again and again now, especially in forums, both from website privateers and SEO companies, the same question, Is Google Broken?

There is now a growing volume of people who believe it is broken and a strong undercurrent spreading that is leading webmasters to openly state this in journals and forums, this in turn has reached a point where it is now the leading reason being put forward for lack of performance and loss of profile in Google searches.

The industry says Yes! I hear the shouts of agreement and feel the nodding heads but then its all too easy to use this as an excuse for a lack of understanding and knowledge, in fact my answer to this is NO!

Sure enough Google has some issues and many of these are well documented, however these problems are merely compounding a more fundamental trend, and this is the increasing lack of understanding about what Google is all about. This lack of understanding seems now to be a progressive issue as the momentum gathers, which of course is driven by industry debate on some very public Google problems.

The most recent problem is the acknowledgement that a search engine spammer got 5 billion pages into the Google index, he used a technique partly driven by sub domains and partly by page generation software , in addition the spammer carefully studied the Google system and then found the opportunity to put his plan into action. The resulting pages were devoured by Google very quickly and of course in a finite database room had to be made for such a massive data push, the effect of this was that for a period of time Googles’ database struggled to cope and then rectify the problem.

Of course issues such as this, combined with others such as the non www repercussions, PR hijacking, the launching of a powerful new datacenter and many other irritations have had an effect on the stability of the database and the integrity of the search results. The real problem though stems from the timing of all this and that is what is driving the hysteria and this in turn has masked a growing lack of expertise and understanding of SEO and in particular Organic Search Optimisation.

Google Update

To understand this we need to go back to the end of 2005, to a period where Google changed many aspects of its algorithm and how it evaluates a good document (website). Some of the changes were very subtle and were going to take time to filter through before affecting millions of websites, whilst as ever; there were also some more aggressive changes. It is the aggressive changes that let the industry know something is afoot, checking different datacenters to correlate results gives an insight into an index shuffle (once called the ‘Google Dance’), an aggressive change creates large scale migration of web positions and these are easy to spot.

When this happens the industry forums are awash with postings and observations from experts and victims, importantly at the end of last year there was one such event but it seemed to have a ‘creeping’ effect, sure enough some people were drastically affected whilst many others only shifted a few positions. This effect always splits opinions as to what has changed, the post update period is a grey rather cold affair with a mixture of relief and despair depending on how it has affected your website.

Previous updates had left widespread destruction across the Internet with wholesale culling of websites from the active search results, these updates had names which ironically could be applied to a hurricane, Jagger 1, 2 and 3, the Florida update and so on. Websites that had been established for years disappeared without trace overnight leaving behind distraught website owners and webmasters.

As I said earlier the update in the fourth quarter of 2005 was a rather more subtle affair but as time went on there were to be many far reaching implications.

Bad Timing

Of course there is good reason for Google to progressively apply these updates, the improvement of its search results has now become a priority again with the driving factor being relevance. This will always be the case, Google is no different to any other leading search facility, in the long term it will live and die on the quality of its search results and so it will always try to improve the service.

Why was this update so important? Well many people did not see any change, it was just like the ‘seventh wave’ experience, a little more turbulence than normal with some people being caught unawares but the masses sighed with relief. That then led to complacency, after this update came a series of changes and some functionality issues that affected how Googles infrastructure worked, the database started to return strange results and became unstable and in turn this confused the industry.

Remembering of course that Google search results come from well over 100 different datacenters all with different IP addresses, it is not surprising that glitches and instability will become a factor when improvements are being implemented to the system. This has now gone on for some months but the timing of this is crucial because it overlapped with the November algorithm update. The result of this overlap was confusion as to exactly why websites were dropping out of their search positions. There is no doubt that some websites have been adversely affected by Google’s instability, but many more are victims to the update that occurred at the end of the year. The problem is that the aftermath of the update has been slow to take effect, many websites have gradually become less relevant in the index and now the growing publicity of Google’s functionality issues has overshadowed this update.

Google is not Broken

The result is that the industry is associating the loss of profile for the affected websites solely with these well publicised functionality problems, the ramifications of this are that webmasters and website owners have ceased to improve their websites inline with the change in algorithm and instead have adopted a ‘Google is broken’ mentality. The search engine forums are full of people complaining that their websites have vanished from Google, these people are a mixture of website design companies, SEO companies and private webmasters.

Huge sections of the industry have now swallowed this and are no longer improving their websites inline with what Google now wants. I have analysed many of the affected websites and the majority of them have issues that are detrimental to their performance in Google, they seem to have forgotten that a Google update was implemented in the last quarter of 2005 to improve the quality of the index. In almost every case their demise is down to bad practice and they are not victims of a Google breakdown.

A closer look at these websites will reveal compliancy issues and inadvertent bad practice, yet even when they are advised of the problems, webmasters are refusing to accept the advice and are sticking to the Google is broken theory. This indeed is a poor approach, the same people are claiming to have done all they can but it is just not true, the real problem is that their websites are badly administered.

Website Compliancy

A closer look at these websites will reveal serious problems with duplication, server administration and domain name hierarchy, in addition content is now even more important, but so is how it is rendered. There has been an increase in the use of news and auto generated content, webmasters seem to think this is good content, at best they write an introduction paragraph for this information before publishing it to their website. The increased use of this type of information combined with the use of text based advertising in side menus is having a very detrimental effect on website integrity due to how it is implemented by today’s webmasters.

All of these factors are now far more important than they were prior to the update, any failings in these sectors will have a dramatic effect on the evaluation of the website by Google as it is looking for information in a certain way and of a certain quality. Some of these issues will also render a website to be non compliant with search engine guidelines

Sure enough this very important search facility has some issues but Google is not broken, however, the knowledge and expertise of a large section of the SEO industry is lacking with an increasing reliance on the breakdown theory, the real reason for the decline in profile for many websites is their non compliance in relation to the last Google update.

Remember the golden rule-there is no divine right to be in Google!