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Google, WMW React on Redirected Results Debate  (View post)

John Honeck [PersonRank 10]

Monday, March 5, 2007
17 years ago4,986 views

Congratulations to you for bringing this to the forefront. I figured that they were close to a subscription based indexing announcement when there were signals that this post from Matt was coming up. Maybe they still are as I don't have any connections like you do, just reading the writing on the walls.

For the love of all things good, I hope this doesn't devolve into another pointless 'it's-cloaking, not-it's-not-cloaking' thread.

Dave [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Philipp – a very tactful response to the situation. Operating a site that comes quite close to wmw in terms of traffic I don't really buy Bretts arguments. He tries to imply that WMW is some kind of special case that gets particularly hard hit by the bots. At the end of the day he's talking about saving himself bandwidth and CPU charges and whilst he's completely entitled to do whatever he wants with his site, I don't think it should justify special case treatment on behalf of Google. Matt seems to say that there won't be any special case (“it should happen for every click from a Google search result”) but Google's actions, with WMW, countless cases on Google scholar and elsewhere seem to still suggest their actions are different from their words.

JohnMu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Why does CNN not have to resort to "this-is-not-cloaking-redirecting"? BBC? Wikipedia? slashdot? Digital Point? Matt Cutts? Why is that forum so special? Is it just a resource issue, missing optimizations or insufficient hardware?

Scrapers are a fact of life, you would assume that WMW would out-rank them anyway, why fight them in a way that absolutely ruins the experience for your visitors? Would not the average visitor be better off – in the worst case – by seeing the scraped WMW content and seeing the link to WMW than being presented with a login-page for something that looked like it might have been interesting? I can almost understand why the content is scraped – if only to allow the normal visitor to see it without having to sign up :-).

I have a feeling this would not really be an issue if the login page were different. "Free registration required" (perhaps with a link to a free email service – heck, an affiliate link if you want). Why does it have to look like a "pay-to-access" login page? How much money was made from Google referrers – from the sneaky registration page redirects? How many email addresses were collected?

John Honeck [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

JohnMu, the answers to your questions in your 2nd paragraph are in the 3rd paragraph. :)

Michael Martinez [PersonRank 5]

17 years ago #

Many people have complained openly about Google's unfair favoritism to subscription-only sites. Hopefully Philip has put them on notice that a lot of us are really tired of a problem of Google's own making. It has the ability to detect these kinds of sites and either flag them (as Danny Sullivan suggests) or filter them (which some people may continue to ask for).

I think that if Google applies a fair and standard policy to all Web sites without showing the favoritism it has historically been so guilty of, the user experience will improve. And if that means flagging subscription-only sites and letting us filter them on a query-by-query basis (or through Personalized Search), that is fine with me.

Tony Spencer [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

This isn't the first time Cutts has spoken to Tabke about it. It was the reason for Tabke's original stance on the topic:

http://www.tonyspencer.com/2005/12/27/tabke-caves-in-and-lets-google-back-in/

ogletree [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Brett does not want to pay the extra cost of bots. A site like wmw spends a fortune on bots. He is trying to run a business and keep the bottom line down. I remember back when he noindexed the site he said that most the Google traffic was to forums that were not the major focus of wmw.

Martin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

A good step to make the Google index better. Thanks Matt!

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I do not think WMW did a right way.

1.Bot can give a fake header same as the Google's to WMW. From a router, they can fake the IP also. So no way to prevent WMW to be botted, except WMW block Google also.

2.The pages listed in the Google results is not delicious for the bot owner. Google will give the copier a bad credit. The right way for the bot owner is to cache and republish the content as fast as the copied content were listed in Google first. So copied content will be treated as original but original will be treated as spam, although at WMW site.

WMW's way is just block commen users but useless for the real thief. So, which is the right way?

Internet have many basic bugs, if the internet protocol not update, WMW can not at a right way, cause the basic is wrong.

For now, the best way but not the right way is here:
1.For the per new post and comment at WMW's BBS, ping Google, just make WMW is faster than the thief. Then the thief will not be interesting in WMW's content.

2.Make the click from Google credited.

3.Make the content can be seen by Google without login. But for common users, must login to see the content, and use random cookies or other random parameters(random image).

But, also have the ways to fuck the 3 way above.

Old chinese aphorism: "The wall is 10000 meter high, just can keep who do not want to walk in". So the simplest way is to make WMW can be seen by Brett Tabke only. Haha, if this, who interested in WMW?

Raqueeb Hassan [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Why did WebmasterWorld sent registration pages instead of real content in the first place? That's my question too. At least they have a reputation of serving better contents without much hassle.

--
Raqueeb Hassan
Bangladesh

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