Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I suspect it will be all back to normal very shortly ;)
Nice to see Google on the wrong end of the 302 stick for a change.
would think they would have made a wiser choice in victims.
Probably either auto-generated or intended to open some eyes / encourage some action at the 'plex.
MG
Google's got a real problem with redirects. And, they can't fix it easily. If this Adsense page redirect gets fixed it would have been a manual correction and everyone + dog will cry foul.
Well spotted, Jen. I believe yours was the first mention of it anywhere.
Actually, if you read Jenstar's blog, she credits the source.
I honestly believe that this guy did this accidentally. He probably intends to put content about Adsense at a later date, and just redirect to Google for the time being - but rather than change his nav, he just redirected the target page.
The point is that this guy *owns* the term Adsense in Google - he could do anything he wants with that traffic. The fact that he hasn't redirected the traffic pretty much proves he did it by accident.
What a week for GG to be on vacation, surely he is getting a chuckle out of this if his girl friend is letting him use his laptop<g>
It will be interesting to see how Google handles the situation.
proves he did it by accident.
Humm, may or may not be true, but according to GG on SlashDot a few months back this should not be possible under Googles cannonical algo.
When you see two copies of a url or site (or you see redirects from one site to another), you have to choose a canonical url. There are lots of ways to make that choice, but it often boils down to wanting to choose the url with the most reputation. PageRank is a pretty good proxy for reputation, and incorporating PageRank into the decision for the canonical url helps to choose the right url.
We do a very good job of picking canonical urls for normal sites; sites with their PageRank going toward zero are more likely to have a different canonical url picked, though, and to a webmaster I understand that it can look like "hijacking" even though the base cause is usually your reputation declining.
If the Google algo was working as they intend it to, the guy doing the meta refresh to Adsense, would not have got a look in at the SERPS. The fact that he has, presumably means that the algo is "not very good" at allocating the "reputation" to the correct page of a duplicate pair. Those of us hit by this problem know that the canonical algo is "dubious" in its effectiveness in picking the original of two identical sites.
In this case the Google algo seems to have damned their own page as been the "cheap copy" and the other page as the "real McCoy". Hence it has promoted the wrong page up the SERPS and the page that is the real authority down the SERPS. The main AdSense page on G does not appear to have touched the sides on the way down.
Google has avoided fixing this problem over a considerable period of time, and has been happy either to avoid it (head in the sand) or (as in the case of the above quote) blame the webmasters for whining for their own declining reputation.
I would be happy to hear of any other reads on how this has happened. And if it was accidental, seems a bit rum that what could be a simple zero meta refresh could deliver such devasting results on Google
[edited by: cornwall at 4:53 pm (utc) on May 24, 2005]
Probably because as soon as Googleguy started requesting examples of the Canonical URL problem, they got crapflooded with people sending URLs that weren't experiencing this problem, they were just ranking poorly.
GG's take was that he didn't get any. Or hardly any. Which itself didn't sound believeable considering that if people don't volunteer their own sites as examples at least one disgruntled would find and offer a competitor site - or a site in a different sector - that was experiencing the problem.
Ann
I do believe in Google
I do believe in Google
I do believe in Google
I do believe in Google
I do believe in Google
Now for another drink of scotch.
What a bunch of but-voids.
