February 6, 2009 on 8:45 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web, Around the Web
Search Engine Land plopped an
into my inbox this morning and as I was leaving an insanely long comment on that blog, it occurred to me to just post it here.
I love the hand-flapping and red-flag waving that happens whenever the Googs seems to be messing with our lives.
Sometimes I wonder if they don’t necessarily do it under the auspices of a "better user experience" and only do some of this stuff to create columns like this and put all us poor SEOs in a panic.
I don’t, for one second, believe that Google would do something to their search results that would render their own Analytics tool less-capable. Nor do I believe that they would do anything that could do such damage to the analytics software industry.
Has no one wondered what their motivation for doing such a thing would be?
Seriously, when was the last time Google went and did something that so drastically mucked with all our lives that we got mad at them and lost money and clients and shaved all our cats? The Florida Update? From my memory of the experience, all that did was teach us to be a bit more scrupulous (or at least educated in Google’s "rules") in our search engine optimisation efforts.
So, at the risk of sounding too rational and pragmatic and not handflappy enough, I say "So what?"
Google is testing something and may change the entire way they do things…
So what?
So you may have to change the way you do things as well? So you may have to clean up a few of your processes and applications that you’ve long depended on?
Get real and adapt and adjust or die.
I know I’ll be fine, and No, that doesn’t mean I won’t have to do anything. I may have to work my ass off to get my systems to catch up to an all-AJAX SERP from Google, but that’s fine, because there’s probably a lesson in there about how to do things better.
Alrighty, my rant’s over. Catch you later, and have a good website.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Hi Judd,
For the benefit of non-technical people like me, what’s the difference between an AJAX SERP and the ones we see now? What’s the big issue?
February 9th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Hey James,
Right now, Google’s SERPs are rendered in HTML, making them easy to read for Analytics programs and Automatic Rankchecking Software (which is a no-no, according to Googs).
AJAX is a way of pulling information dynamically using JavaScript, and it’s really, really difficult to parse it and read it like HTML.
So basically, it’s just harder for automated thingies to read. Long and short of it.
February 9th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
G’day Judd!
I came across this site today and thought, hang on a minute, I know only one J Exley!
Been a while mate, hope you’re doing well and keeping busy!
cheers,
V
March 9th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Hey Judd!
What happened to you at the last Port 80 gig man? I had to get drunk by myself in front a whole bunch of strangers! Hope we can catch up at the next one.