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Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

bradleytaunt.com

161–170 of 215 posts

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

#161
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…

Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads) When people think "advertising" they often think TV first. But you might be surprised how reasonable some advertising rates can be for radio (especially classical radio sponsorships and news radio), regional and local newspapers, and certain magazines. A web site I used to own advertised with AdSense for a year.…

We had huge success with metro advertisements (in the actual trains, on one line), and no success with radio, despite having massive coverage. Mileage definitely varies with your product.

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

#162

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 It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible.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…

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice…

I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people ..

Why on earth would you assume this, so obviously contradicted by the evidence?

The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid

The corporatocracy is a pretty pure Darwinian machine for encouraging sociopathy. It's not a matter of 'everyone' being malign, it's that we live in a society (which often, and tellingly, mislabels itself an 'economy') carefully designed to place the worst people in positions of power.

Most people understand this now (even if they're not sure what to do about it yet). It's perhaps unsurprising that the news takes a while to filter through to those benefitting most.

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

#163

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…

> Just don't implement AMP. ... you can still get excellent results without it; it's a very small boost.

What evidence do you have that it's only a small boost? That may be the case for very specific searches. But if you search anything where there is a lot of competition between publishers (coverage of major news stories, product reviews, etc), Google serves almost exclusively AMP results, with the exception of the odd result from Wikipedia or Twitter. Failing to implement AMP would be suicide for many publishers.

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

#164
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…

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

Google and you are no more partners than the fox and the lamb are partners. That’s your main problem. Do you know how many high profile companies have gone belly up because of a Google algorithm change?

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. That's nonsensical. Google already has their content. If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every…

There is no way for a user to disable it on their phone. It causes news stories and blog spam to pop up before product pages or other non-"article" style pages. It basically shoe horns the internet into 1 type of page because if you don't have "article" style pages you don't have amp and don't have the higher ranking. Your getting downmodded because you completely missed the point here. People don't merely hate AMP.…

> It causes news stories and blog spam to pop up before product pages or other non-"article" style pages.

Your whole issue with AMP seems to be not understanding that Google ranking pages badly has nothing to do with with AMP. Google, Baidu, Bing, and other link aggregators that implement AMP caches are free to rank pages however they like and still load AMP pages instantly.

> Your getting downmodded because you completely missed the point here.

I'm getting downmodded because people don't understand technology. That doesn't bother me. I'll still correct them.

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

#166
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it proves anything, but Kleenex is synonymous with facial tissue and Velcro is synonymous with hook and loop fasteners. I "google" things on DuckDuckGo. :)

Yeah, I've been using DDG for years, but I just can't get "Google it" out of my dictionary. I try to replace it with "Duck it", which feels stupid as fuck to say, but "Google it" doesn't feel any better.

How about "search"?

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice…

The trouble is that trusting individual developers at Google is fine, but I don’t trust the overall flow of how things are moving. AMP is one possible response to “websites are slow”, but it also happens to be one that actively consolidates Google’s power in the marketplace and makes things worse for people that try to opt out of the ecosystem. Which is a shame, because it needn’t have been like that.

> also happens to be one that actively consolidates Google’s power in the marketplace

How? If they had gone the Apple News route of making publishers integrate directly with them, that would have been consolidating power. Instead, they ask publishers to output pages that any link aggregator can use, and many other link aggregators do use.

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

#168
post #138
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…

been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. That would be truly something. After all your market is what, 200mln people?

As much as I agree with you, I don't see this happening any time soon.

See, Baidu and Yandex already existed for years before reaching the size they're today. Brazil had it's internally developed search engines before (Cadê, TodoBR, Aonde). Some of them even ranked higher than Google in the early 2000s.

However, with time they got out of business or were bought by Yahoo or Google itself.

And when you think about it, those business (Yandex, Baidu) now offer more than just search - Yandex offers email, maps and more; Baidu has Cloud Storage, Browser and even hosts a Wikipedia-like website - or have some degree of government ties at their countries - Google being banned from China; Yandex reportedly handled information for FSB.

You need to have all those advantages to replicate the success case of Yandex and Baidu. And there's one of them - time on market - that you can't buy.

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

#169
quote:"If you feel inspired to do the same, simply add the following to the head of your pages to stop Google from crawling your website:"

Hahahaha. Hey, I found the joke of the week and is only Wednesday. If you think for one second that a meta or robots.txt is stopping google to crawl your website you're naive.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

. . . and the marketability and prestige of having Google on your resume.

Personally I would rather consider this to be a smudge on a resume, because for me it means, that that person worked for something, that is known to not be a force of good any longer, probably for money or wannabe fame "Hey, look, I worked at Google! Look how good I am!". Maybe it will work with HR people, but personally in my eyes Google on the resume disqualifies you from being hired. To work at Google has to be an…

I largely agree, so I'd like to ask: do you hire people?
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