Google bugs and Anti-Trust Hearings — Jordan Koene // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “The Google bugs that have been publicly stated to have occurred are around indexing of content. These issues around indexing are really centered around the idea of how Google is serving up the URLs in search. Its a huge issue because when youre, a.) indexing URLs or youre not able to index the URLs at all, it becomes a challenge for the users to find the content that they want.” -Jordan

• “When you say, theyre having trouble indexing, for the non-SEO, this means theyre having trouble getting the right links in the right order on search results pages, and thats the whole product.”-Ben

• “Thats true, Ben and its basically the core of what they do. I mean the indexation process is the pivotal moment at which users are actually gaining access to the URLs in the content that are supposed to surface for that keyword.” -Jordan“As we all know theres the crawl, index ranking kind of procedure that exists in search and if the indexing isnt working, who gives a shit about the rankings?” -Jordan

• “One of these issues is around canonicalization and then the other was with mobile indexing. This is essentially what Google has stated and the ultimate problem that resulted from this is that either the wrong URLs are showing up or the URLs werent showing up at all.” -Jordan

• “How big is this problem? Google claims it has impacted roughly .02 percent of their index and how many URLs does Google index? Billions.” -Jordan

• “What is .02 percent of a billion? So were talking about 2 million pages here.” -Ben

• “Its a lot of content, lets put it that way and it had a material impact. There was a lot of chatter, a lot of the tools, and a lot of the analysts out there, the search pundits were active because of the significant change in this canonicalization. Its very confusing onset.” -Jordan

• “Another issue around mobile indexing, a little more severe and again Google said .02 percent of their index was impacted by this. These two topics were inter-related and has a huge impact overall to the search landscape.” -Jordan

• “We arestill in the early stages of trying to unpack if it hits any specific but theres nothing that indicates this was targeting a specific industry or a specific vertical. What I assume here is that this is a lot to do with their infrastructure set up.” -Jordan

• “Right now, Google has largely fixed the issue and as of right now, I havent seen any additional issued public statement around it being fully resolved.” -Jordan

• “I think that there will be some recourse here wherein the community would be much more vocal in wanting to understand why these things are occurring. Its going to be important for Google to find clever and useful ways to be transparent.” -Jordan

• “So theres a community coordination piece where Google is doing a better job of communicating when they have made a mistake so people understand that there is an algorithm change.” -Ben

• “It gives great pause when algorithm changes do come about. Were always quick to assume that Google has changed some massive algorithms that is going to impact every single company in the world. Thats just downright false. There are mistakes that happen at Google because they are a technology company run by human beings just like any other company and thats just what happens.” -Jordan

• “The big thing here that I want to highlight is that we at SEO as a community need to be more careful about our judgment as to what is Google is doing.” -Jordan

• “The ultimate summary of this is the investigation by the US House around the power that many of these companies have. These big technologies. And this is not just about Google, this implicates, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and the idea here is very similar to what happened with Microsoft 15 or 20 years ago, whether or not these companies need to be broken up or better regulated because of their size and influence.” -Jordan

• “The reality here is that the common person who is not in the technology field, they do not understand what these companies are doing and how they are doing them. I think that lack of transparency, that lack of connection to the consumer is the biggest challenge that any of these companies have.” -Jordan

• “I mean it took forever to force Facebook and many other social platforms to come to a conclusion on whether or not youll be able to delete your own personal content that you uploaded to that platform. In my opinion, that shouldnt require regulation and government to be involved, they should just do that because its good for the customer.” -Jordan

• “I think that the government is looking at the problem with wage and wealth disparity between the people that are running these companies, wielding a tremendous amount of power, so thats a concern and theres also a large disparity between the average American and the wealthiest Americans.” -Ben

• “My problem with the anti-trust conversation is, people are saying, Well, Google owns 90% plus of search. Truth is, sure Google has a search monopoly but their business is in the advertising game. They are competing against Facebook and Facebook is competing against Amazon and Amazon is competing against Netflix and Apple.” -Ben

• “So the irony to me, when I hear about these hearings, is not, does one of these businesses have an incredible foothold, if not a monopoly on a type of web traffic or interaction. To me, it is, Are they monopolizing the advertising business, the software distribution, the e-commerce? I think that is really the conversation we should be having.” -Ben

• “I would encourage our listeners to go and find who their local representatives are and see how they are reacting to this particular probe as they are taking a point and a stance and that the only way you are going to have an influence in this process is if you go out and vote.” -Jordan