Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

bradleytaunt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 215 posts

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#31

Post by liberte82 »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #23
LyndsySimon wrote: post #8

> Google needs to stick to being a solid search engine instead of trying to be gate keepers While I agree with the sentiment, I feel like this ship sailed years ago - it's like saying "Amazon should stick to being an ecommerce platform". What's more, Google was never in the business of "being a solid search engine". Google is and always has been in the business of selling access to users' eyeballs. AMP - as much as I…

> What's more, Google was never in the business of "being a solid search engine". Google is and always has been in the business of selling access to users' eyeballs. That's not how they became the darling of the tech scene though. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not…

When Google was first released it was revolutionary. I remember just being amazed at the quality of the search results compared to any other engines. And amazingly, the competitors still haven't caught up, for all of Google's issues.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#32

Post by speeder »

I am currently struggling with Google and been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow.

My current business is heavily Google reliant, and Google been proving to be a very poor business partner:

* Keeps punishing my site both in organic rank and AdWords rank (thus price) for not being mobile, despite my site being intended to be viewed by engineers with big screens.

* They remove frequently whatever features they had to avoid wasting money, the one that offended me the most is that I can't anymore advertise on mobile websites unless I also allow apps too, and apps are purely fraudulent clicks, babies don't buy industrial parts...

* Google refuses to take care of fraud, I've visited the top sources of clicks on my display campaigns and there was comments for example on store pages explicitly complaining it was pure fraud, and Google does nothing about it (example: one source of clicks was a flashlight app on Android that opens ads whenever the user turns the flashlight on, clicking the ad is only way to turn it off again)

* Google often randomly stop my ads and search because bogus reasons, requiring me to call them to fix it.

* They removed from AdWords interface the max click price when the campaign is in automatic mode, in the past this was very useful to find out if their AI was bugged (like one time it insisted on setting max cpm to 0.01 despite average cost until that day being 1.20...) or oberpricing me (charging ludicrous prices per click)

Their product (ad publishing, not search) is crap, but they have literal Monopoly, all other ads publishers I tried gave me almost zero clicks...

Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads)

I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#33

Post by t0mbstone »

echeese wrote: post #21

There's an easier way - don't implement AMP.

Yeah, I don't understand this post. There are billions of pages out there without AMP and Google indexes them just fine. If you don't wanna implement AMP, then just don't implement it. You don't have to completely block Google over it.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#34

Post by StudentStuff »

LinuxBender wrote: post #29
joering2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you block their IP? Google has hundreds of numbers and AFAIK they don’t even publish all of them.

As others mentioned, you can block their user-agent. That will stop most crawling. They have some bots that use browser agents to see if you serve different content to non-google bots. To block those, you can feed their IP's to haproxy or iptables ipset. fetch_google() { for line in $(dig +short txt _cloud-netblocks.googleusercontent.com | tr " " "\n" | grep include | cut -f 2 -d :) do dig +short txt "${line}" done |…

Any clue if Google crawls from IPv6 addresses?

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#35

Post by liberte82 »

1shooner wrote: post #16
bhartzer wrote: post #4

Just to be clear, there is a mistake in this post. Adding a noindex tag will cause google to not display the page in their search results. They will still crawl ( they have to), in order to see that directive. Also, keep in mind that google has recently changed the way they deal with robots.txt. So they only way to do what the author is suggesting is to add the noindex meta tag and let them crawl. Once they are remov…

I've found that google will still include the page in their search index if it's been discovered by means other than crawling the resource itself (e.g. it's linked from other pages). The search result will simply not include any content from the page, since they've presumably not crawled the page.

if noindex == true { content = "" }

Of course they still have it indexed in their own systems .... would you trust Google not to.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#36

Post by Twisell »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #8

> Google needs to stick to being a solid search engine instead of trying to be gate keepers While I agree with the sentiment, I feel like this ship sailed years ago - it's like saying "Amazon should stick to being an ecommerce platform". What's more, Google was never in the business of "being a solid search engine". Google is and always has been in the business of selling access to users' eyeballs. AMP - as much as I…

The ship have sailed is never an acceptable argument it’s just a lazy way to justify status quo.

As a French I’m pretty glad in retrospect that my ancestors under Napoleon reign and the Bourbon restoration didn’t go like “I really think democracy would have been a nice feature but I feel like this ship sailed”

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#38

Post by whatshisface »

speeder wrote: post #32

I am currently struggling with Google and been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. My current business is heavily Google reliant, and Google been proving to be a very poor business partner: * Keeps punishing my site both in organic rank and AdWords rank (thus price) for not being mobile, despite my site being intended to be viewed by engineers with big scr…

>I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans.

To build an anti-monopoly case you would have to do more than show that Google was the only good ad vendor. Are they the only ones that can give you clicks because they are smarter and better at their jobs than every other ad vendor, or are they the only ones that can give you clicks because of underhanded market tactics? If I was the best shoemaker in town, to the point where buying shoes from anybody else was a waste of time, that wouldn't be illegal. You'd have to show I was doing more to stop competition.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#39

Post by rangeofmotion »

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared and willing to sell everyone else out so they can pay their mortgage? Are there efforts internally to try and stop them from centralizing everything? What's going on here? I know only a couple of people who don't think Google is a real problem today.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#40

Post by heyyyouu »

I'm very confused by this article -- AMP is an optional framework: https://amp.dev/ and even if you use it you can opt out of having Google load/point to it: https://support.google.com/news/producer/answer/7281462?hl=e... You don't need to no_index your site. What can you do about it? Just don't implement AMP. Yes, sites who do AMP get preferential treatment in search engines, but you can still get excellent results without it; it's a very small boost.
Post reply on HN