the g-word

[lucy24]

What do you mean, the software won't let me post five pages of blather in a single serving?

Chop, chop, slice.

Chapter One:

A year ago I did not know google existed. It’s just a place you go to look up stuff. Things I have learned in recent months:

1. A Watched Search Engine Never Indexes

I need to change my signature in another forum. So why don’t I? Because when I do, half a dozen people will race to google to look it up. (I know this from past experience.) The complete phrase does not currently exist anywhere on the Internet. So I added a paragraph to the appropriate page, sat back and waited for g### to re-index it.

For the next seven days, they tormented me by repeatedly crawling every single page in the directory-- except that one. They have now moved to Phase Two: putting it in the “We’ll index it when we get around to it” bin. Unlike WebmasterWorld forums which apparently do not trust their members to decipher a three-letter abbreviation, I do not find my words in g### an average of five minutes after uttering them. Unless, of course, I uttered them here.

2. An Unwatched Search Engine Always Goes Haywire

I have a page that I’m particularly fond of. Its title is, by necessity, a fairly well-known phrase. So it should be pretty gratifying that g### puts the page at something like #5 or 6-- slightly higher in Canada-- out of something in excess of a billion hits. (For you Europeans, that’s 10^9, not 10^12.) This ludicrously high number is because every single word in the phrase is a short, common word-- most of them so common, they wouldn’t even be listed as keywords. It would be hard to write a page of text that didn’t use them. (I checked. I’ve already used all six.)

Except, except, except... Except that I know darn well the people who enter this search string are not looking for my cute little page, or anything like it. They know it too, and stay away in droves. They’re probably looking for the locus classicus of the phrase, and swearing at google for giving them a bunch of irrelevancies. Sometimes I’ve edited pages after looking at search strings and figuring out what kind of information people are actually looking for. Not this time.

3. Put ’em Back the Way They Was

I got used to glancing at the keyword list in GWT, the one buried in the right column of the “dashboard”, and shrugging it off. I write a lot of linguistically oriented stuff, so it is probably inevitable that two of the top five were “word” and “verb”. (The really good words like “morphophonetic” are nowhere to be found.) Also “it’s”. Really. It’s. IT’S. This would be nice if I were selling ice cream treats in San Francisco, but otherwise it doesn’t get you far.

Then one day I looked-- and every single word was different. Most of them were personal names that have nothing to do with me. What the bleepity bleepity? G### had compiled a fresh Keywords list out of just one page-- and that one page is a MiSTing, so half the words aren’t even mine. (The original author can only bow his head in resignation. He wrote it in 1804, and by 1811 it had been successfully pirated.)

I’m wrong, of course. The familiar old monosyllables are still there, just 10-20 steps further down. It happened because this page, which google has somehow only just discovered although it has been essentially unchanged since early 2009, is the second-fattest page on the whole site. The #1 fattest page is an e-text made from a massively plagiarized novel whose favorite source was the book used in #2. It took a few more days for that one to be digested, but I now have even more of the same names. And some others, equally meaningless to me. Page #4 by weight is also an e-text. It’s a children’s book about rats, so it took some close searching to establish that they’ve keyworded it. I wonder why Whiskerandos rates, while the equally prominent Dwishtswatshiksky doesn’t? The biggest oddity was #3, which contains at least one name that should count for something. That’s assuming for the sake of discussion that a former prime minister of Canada carries more weight than the word “and”. Guess I should have slipped his name into the text a few more times.

To be continued...

[tangor]

lucy24... sometimes we over-think...

Make a site for users, FIRST, then let all the rest happen. That's really about all the control a webmaster has, particularly these recent daze (sic).

GWT is a gimmick used by G to encourage spending. Some do (Adsense, Adwords) some don't (me, these days for example). Quit using GWT some years back and (after diversification, etc.) seem to be both unharmed and still growing business (sans most of G's offerings). Different strokes for different folks. HOWEVER...!

Just about everything else observed in your posts also applies to every other SE out there, so ... thanks for the reminder that we webmasters are, sadly but true, 99% dependent on ALL SEARCH ENGINES and that 1% (if you are doing it) which is word of mouth or a bit of print, radio, tv advertising.

As an aside... I experimented with a weekend's worth of flyers* under windshield wipers on cars parked in a supermarket lot... and experienced a next week increase of 25% sales. Just waiting a month or so more before I try that again, but with TWO supermarkets targeted instead, just to see if that works. This does, of course, skip the SEs altogether, but does have the side benefit of being TYPED IN URLS which has got to mean SOMETHING!

^{*500 letter-size zapped off the laser printer... a ream of paper}

[lucy24]

Chapter Two:

4. Is Nothing Sacred?

We all know about indexing robots.txt files and sitemap.xml files. (“It’s an URL. URLs get indexed.”) So why should it surprise me to find the googlebot scooping up a .js file? What they plan to do with it is a mystery. Are there a lot of people searching for the phrase “d.appendChild(s);” and coming up empty-handed?

5. When the search engine says Jump, the user says How High?

Monday found me screaming with excitement as I saw my first specimen of Page Fragment Navigation on a SERP. Two of ’em, in fact. I never knew they existed, and had to go look them up [webmasterworld.com]. Turns out they were only introduced in 2009, so no wonder. Maybe it’s my reward for writing hopelessly retro html with old-fashioned anchors and visible-to-the-naked-eye lists of internal links. Or for forcing myself to bump all the headers up one notch. (It’s an e-book thing. The <h1> is only for the main title, so everything goes downward from there. Even <h2> feels like I’m shouting rudely and beating people over the head.)

One of the two was pretty superfluous, because the whole page is about the search string. In fact the target sentence appears within a few lines of the top-- using a synonym and some grammatical variation, so maybe the robot didn’t get it. In any case, nothing on the page would give the user the information they were looking for. But the other Jump To was textbook perfect: the fourth and last “chapter” on a longish page containing an assortment of unrelated stuff. Thanks to the link, the user got to jump straight to the part they were interested in. You can tell because raw logs include the #nameofinnerlink element.

6. Prices Slightly Higher in Canada

I’d forgotten all about this phrase until I thought about my favorite directory. Rankings slightly higher in Canada, for the rock-solid reason that its content is all-- to a greater or lesser extent-- concerned with a Canada-specific subject. This would be a lot more thrilling if the subject in question were, say, hockey. Or if I actually knew anything about the subject instead of yakking about the various ways it is possible to not know anything about it. But still.

7. What you say will come back to bite you.

a. I once described someone as the world's leading authority on such-and-such obscure subject. I didn't and still don't know if he really is, but I haven't seen any serious competition. Months later it occurred to me that it should be possible to look it up.

::search, search::

Oh, now this sounds promising: an article by the person I named. I've read the article; it's damn good. Maybe I glossed over an introduction by some equally knowledgeable person, describing him as the world's leading et cetera.

No luck. Maybe in some older, cached version. This comes with the g### boilerplate, informing me that my search terms only appear in pages that link to this page. Let's stop right there.

b. Elsewhere I complain that such-and-such plus this-and-that is not a google-friendly combination-- with appended details. This particular search is one that I repeat every few months in hopes that something new will turn up. Sometimes this works. A book I've been coveting for ages recently showed up online. Sometimes it doesn't. Instead, I get treated to my own page talking about the google-unfriendliness of the said group of words.

Oh well.

[wheel]

I do not find my words in g### an average of five minutes after uttering them. Unless, of course, I uttered them here.

I've been busted on that one before. Post a question here, wait 5 minutes. Go google it to see if there's an answer anywhere else - and awesome! Number 1 result in Google, someone's asked the very same question I did.

Except it's me that asked the question, Google's already indexed my post here.

[Leosghost]

This is how it goes...just when you think your hovercraft is empty..or full ..

[lucy24]

This is how it goes...just when you think your hovercraft is empty..or full ..

Well, that's where your user-oriented editing comes in. Thanks to g###'s inability to distinguish between the noun "meaning" (not even a gerund, the lexical noun) and the participle "meaning", I get all these people wanting to know what the phrase means. What do they mean, "what does it mean"? It's a blasted Monty Python sketch, fer hevvins sakes. And then someone reminds me that the whole point of the sketch is that it does mean something. So I go and watch it again-- this is not an enormous hardship-- and stick in a sentence for the benefit of the people who inexplicably have no interest in the difference between ammajaq and nimiraq. Shrug. Maybe they'll stick around and read a few sentences. Maybe they'll get hooked on the language. Stranger things have happened.

For similar reasons I shoved in a bunch of outside links on a page whose only purpose is to unload one of my (free) keyboard layouts. Thankfully I am not a Real Webmaster, so I did not spend so much as one nanosecond wondering whether the said links would (a) benefit me (b) benefit the person at the other end (c) harm me or (d) harm the person at the other end. They just might conceivably be useful to the human visitor.

I also with great sorrow rewrote an entire page so that instead of focusing on the stuff that interested me, it starts out talking about the stuff people are trying to find out. (Anyone know how to convert an existing Mac keyboard layout into an installable Windows format without recourse to heavy-duty Machine Language? If I knew where to go I'd put in a link, because making keyboards from my end is a snap.) Some of the questions suggest that they've been asleep since 1999, but that can't be helped.

And then, to make myself feel better, I wrote some horrendously malformed javascript in order to shove in a bunch of inuksuks. Which these Forums will refuse to display, not being Latin-1. Spoilsports.

[Leosghost]

Wiki' and others dispute that plural?

One can do menhir in foo :)

I I I I I I I I I I I

I I I I I I I I I I I

and dolmen

___
I I I

and with more patience than I care to apply at this time of night..Stonehenge and major megalithic temples even..

Which is more dignified than rabbits and Buddhas etc..

I would have thought Inuksuk would be the northernmost menhirs..

[lucy24]

Wiki' and others dispute that plural?

I just said it in English. Like, ahem, dolmens and menhirs. It's "really" inuksuit, of course. And sure you can do anything using ASCII art-- I once had to do Greek currency notations for an e-text-- but I meant you can't do the real thing. It just changes to &#5120;.

[buckworks]

Nagligivagit.

[lucy24]

Aw, shucks.

:: blushing modestly ::

I had to go look it up out of curiosity and was surprised at the enormous disparity between v- and j-forms, in both transliteration and syllabic. And then there are the y-forms, which shouldn't occur at all...

Found a query in my logs about font substitution in Opera. I actually know the answer to that one-- it wasn't just g### picking one word from here and another from there-- so I hope they came away satisfied.