What's Up With This Blog?

When I first heard about Blogs some years ago, I was underwhelmed. They sounded like daily vapor-trails of the HTML-illiterati, and I wanted no part of them. So what, you may ask, has changed?

Google for one thing. Since founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page sold out, there have been several "improvements" to googlebot, the company's spider. Most of these have had to do with reducing the impact of "thin affiliates" on their search results.

The rationale is: "Sites that 'only' point to other sites have no unique content, and therfore web users actually want to see the originating site." Wait a minute! Google 'only' points to other sites doesn't it?

Add a pre-existing prejudice against subdomains (the "free" webspace most ISPs provide is a subdomain.) and you begin to feel that the new Corporate Google is promoting toll-booths on the information superhighway.

Paranoid? I don't think so! Google provides a free "search this site" service for domains only although there is no reason the technology couldn't be implemented for subdomains. If you use a competing search service anywhere on your site, you can't feature their popular AdSense product!

Take a look at our new bookstore. We've developed a method that allows users to quickly find Amazon "browse category" pages -- a feat that neither Amazon nor Google searches can readily emulate. The value added is improved search, not "me too" text.

So how does Google respond? So far the pages are indexed really badly. I'm making modifications to improve their index-friendliness, but basically the thinking at Google seems to be "My way or the highway."

Web sites must have a single theme that googlebot can understand. Affiliate links must be accompanied by lots of text and outside links. (Googlebot is far too stupid to evaluate their quality it's interested only in their presence.)

There are bound to be more posts along the lines of this one, as I am presently heavily involved in making the bookstore "work," but that is not the single unifying theme of this blog. Oh, right, googlebot treats blogs in a completely different way...