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Hmm, now if only the press catches this story!
"Election candidates fail to get free promotion?"
"Private business doesn't go out of it's way to promote every candidate?"
"Local candidates depend on third party to distribute promotional materials?"
No story here and not even a problem. I would think that the amount of information that an election site produces is minimal and Google's goal is to "organize information."
Election sites have no proven track record of providing accurate or factual information, so why include them with special rules? (In some extreme cases, they provide misinformation.)
Election sites have no proven track record of providing accurate or factual information
Neither do affiliate sites and they seem to be doing OK.
The inclusion of any low-quality sites is not a precedent to include more low-quality sites.
misinformation is still information.
Seems the point of this thread was that candidate sites should be included even if they have no inbound links and no original content.No, the point of the thread was to illustrate that Google is not doing what it is supposed to do, which is to provide useful information in response to a query. These sites do have inbound links, they do have content, and they do have a shelf life. Just to be clear, they are not showing up when searching for the candidates name and the town the election is in (or any search).
And to add to my original post. One of the sites shows up on Yahoo today. Google not only has lost their advantage, but Y! is picking up the ball. :)
Maybe that's why in this election the candidates seem to be mentioning their domain names in the media more often. ;)
Even if they do get the domain name wrong :-)
It is amazing how one can defend google no matter how bad they are. That is close to the most absurd, silly statement I have EVER seen on this forum. Soemtimes a terd is just a terd.....
Fact is that if I'm searching for Joe Candidate, I want to find his website. I don't want to go through 15 pages of blog posts and forum talk to get to his site. That is what I consider a bad search result and a poor search engine.
This doesn't just happen to candidates. Try running searches on new movies, books, or video games. If they have a new stand alone domain, don't even bother to find them on the first 10 pages.
Google is no longer a search engine out there to provide the best results. They are a funky kind of PFI search engine. Don't let this "we don't charge to be listed in our index" fool you. Sandbox is nothing more than a way of making you pay to be seen in Google.
There is no excuse to have to go to page 15 to find a candidate. If I want to find an old fact about something, I'll use Google. If I want some new information, I'll use a real search engine.
I guess I am blind. ¦-)
A link from a decent State Party site can help and even the shoddier ones seem to get spidered frequently. There are alway a few candidates that won't link but a competent webbie can explain the benifits (PR/serp) to the political staff and they can translate that into political chits that the candidates understand. Doesn't always work, but it does more often than not. Also get links from same party blogs throughout the state. A little late for this cycle, but '06 is just around the corner...
I didn't realize this was just another backdoor argument against the "sandbox.There is nothing backdoor about it. The moderators will edit any title that says 'sandbox' and google lag is the pferred term they change it to. 'Google lag'='sandbox'. This thread brings up an area where other search engines beat Google. You can deride the thread, or discuss it, its youre choice.
Dude, the title says "GOOGLE LAG" - that is backdoor?. What is your argument? That political candidates website's should NOT be listed in search engines? LOL!
This is the google news forum. The fact that google is so incompetent/stale that they cannot even find political websites anymore is newsworthy. Frankly, IMO, nearly ever single thread should discuss the "lag", as it has changed google from the most webmaster friendly SE to the LEAST webmaster friendly SE in the span of 6 months....
It is useful for all of us to try for a minute to understand what is happening here. Google is a big part of the flow of info and they are trying hard to stop the proliferation of new domains. This has ZERO to do with SPAM or SEO as demonstrated by this thread. The spammers/seo's are the ones who thrive in this environment. The iomplications of whatever they are doing is pretty big - I know of a charity site that has been "boxed" for 7 months now....
That being said, i am a black hat seo, and business wise, do not really care if they ever let a new domain in again! Actually, if the SERPS never changed again it would be cool :) BUT, google has taken all the free press from webmaster praises for years and, once in a while, it is OK to spread the word that they currently suck!
As far as I am aware, in the five or six months that we have been discussing this there has been no acknowledgement of the situation or recognition of a problem from Google. No matter what the reasons behind this it is, quite simply, indefensible.
Here's how they sum up their section on how to rank ...
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site, which is the best way to ensure you'll be included in Google's results.
Well I did, and they didn't!
Google owes these election candidates and any others who are uploading new websites absolutely nothing, apart that is, from honesty about their chances of being listed in the results.
This is the google news forum. The fact that google is so incompetent/stale that they cannot even find political websites anymore is newsworthy. Frankly, IMO, nearly ever single thread should discuss the "lag", as it has changed google from the most webmaster friendly SE to the LEAST webmaster friendly SE in the span of 6 months....
the IPO is over, remember?
We all want the sandbox to go away for our own sites, but let's talk about political websites ranking in search engines and what kind of preferential treatment they should deserve. Maybe we'll see a situation that warrants so stringent of ranking requirements like a "links must mature over time before counting" rule.
I've got these questions:
1. How is Google supposed to know that which political candidates sites are the legitimate ones?
2. What's to keep me, a political opponent of candidate x from creating a site that masquerades as candidate x's site? (We all know here that a political opponent doesn't need to have that site in the same jurisdiction as the election.)
3. If Google is supposed to immediately rank a political website for the terms that website claims it deserves to be ranked for... how does a site qualify as being political? Can I have a political site that sells products (and dictate to google what terms I show up for)? Please? :D
4. For federal and state elections where many different groups compete to sway voter opinion for and against each candidate, which sites does Google rank first?
The answer to all of these questions in my opinion are rather straightforward if you ignore your own desires for the sandbox effect to go away. The answers are the same for any site, Google has to watch how the rest of the internet responds to the sites before it can decide how relevant the site is to everyone.
The searching public can understand a site not being in a search engine -- they would feel betrayed by a search engine that made any of the mistakes I point out above.
If the quest for profit can lead to the kind of search engine manipulation you see regularly, how will the quest for power drive people to manipulate search engines?
<edit>Typo</edit>
I think animosity towards G may have gotten us off of the topic which is finding a simple solution for this. In my experience the lag, sandbox or whatever you want to call it should not really come into play for these two reasons:
1. Political sites are typically tiny.
A Congressional re-election site I'm working on is up to 70 pages. Woohoo! Thats about twice as big as most of the 20+others I'm working on this cycle. In my experience, the lag effect is primarily felt in bigger sites.
2. Keyword competitiveness
If you do very basic SEO and have a few incoming links from established sites ( state, county, auxillary party websites) G will know about you. When somebody searches for Candidate Widget, the site will show. At the very least the linked sites will show and get your vistors where they need to be. Candidate Widget is not a popular keyword there won't be much competition. Get a few inbounds from established sites and searchers will find you.
Assuming the site consists of more than scanned push cards, this ought to work.
Widget for Congress!
I didn't realize this was just another backdoor argument against the "sandbox.
There is nothing backdoor about it. ...
Using the ranking of political sites to illustrate the ineffectiveness of an entire ranking approach is a unrepresentative sample of sites and ranking as a whole.
By bringing up a small sample of sites, the thread is either:
a) about that small sample of sites and, presumably, how those should be treated differently.
b) about the larger sandbox issue.
If it's just about the sandbox issue, then the specifics are misleading and confusing. It's changing the subject from "link-ranking-over-time" to "valuing political speech."
This thread brings up an area where other search engines beat Google. You can deride the thread, or discuss it, its youre choice.
Pointing out the fallacy of an argument is discussion. It has value to both the participants (who may not realize their fallacy) and the spectators. I don't want anyone to feel bad but that doesn't mean I'm just going to let an error go unrecognized. (Just like if someone posted messed up HTML I would try to help by posting a correction.)
1. How is Google supposed to know that which political candidates sites are the legitimate ones?They aren't. That's not their job. But when someone puts up a site (www.candidatesname) with the title Candidates Name, and the name is unique and other sites link to it using Candidate's Name, then Google should return the site when someone searches for 'Candidates Name'. Other SE's seem to able to do this and Google used to do it better than all of them currently do.
2. What's to keep me, a political opponent of candidate x from creating a site that masquerades as candidate x's site? (We all know here that a political opponent doesn't need to have that site in the same jurisdiction as the election.)Nothing, Google should index that too.
3. If Google is supposed to immediately rank a political website for the terms that website claims it deserves to be ranked for... how does a site qualify as being political? Can I have a political site that sells products (and dictate to google what terms I show up for)? Please? :DThis has nothing to do with politics. This is about information becoming available while it still has value. Google is broken/full and just won't admit it.
4. For federal and state elections where many different groups compete to sway voter opinion for and against each candidate, which sites does Google rank first?Are you suggesting that if it's hard to figure out how to rank something they should just deny its existence? Besides, they have an algorithm designed to do just that.
Google has to watch how the rest of the internet responds to the sites before it can decide how relevant the site is to everyone.
Come on now ... this is just daft! What is the "rest of the Internet"? Google has to wait for no one. Isn't it supposed to be the leader?
I believe that Powdork only used the local elections as a good example of how Google is failing as a search engine because of the Google lag. The thread was really nothing to do with politics. (Powdork - correct me if I am wrong.)
The rest of your questions, like
How is Google supposed to know that which political candidates sites are the legitimate ones?
... don't make much sense to me. Google ranks sites using an algorithm, which I assume is politically neutral. That's why the same Google often puts offensive, racist and terrorist sites at the top of the rankings.
[Edit. Sorry, I posted just after Powdork and I was making similar points.]
By bringing up a small sample of sites, the thread is either:Or maybe, just maybe, it's about how the larger sandbox issue relates to this small sample of sites, which are related by the fact their information will be worth much less after Nov. 2.
a) about that small sample of sites and, presumably, how those should be treated differently.
b) about the larger sandbox issue.
Using the ranking of political sites to illustrate the ineffectiveness of an entire ranking approach is a unrepresentative sample of sites and ranking as a whole.There are already a number of threads pointing the inneffectiveness (complete incompetence) of the ranking systrem as a whole.
