3 ms·

Hasn't google has ranked pages for text that appears in links to them but not on them for a long time?

by eli 8y ago

jakubp 8y ago
I don't know about links, but the phenomenon of getting results for a query like: A "B" with no B on the page has been particularly disturbing for some time. At least months, maybe longer, I can't say. I have no idea why they made a change this drastic (it is drastic when someone makes a deliberate effort to say "I need "B" in the page, it's not a whim or a random query" and the search engine shows results which violate the query _syntax_).
goodcharles 8y ago
Yes this is true. Google will rank web pages, based on the inbound links pointing to the page, even if Google hasn't crawled the page itself. This happens regularly when a web page is blocked from crawling via Robots.txt file. Google still indexes and ranks the page, but Google has no idea what is on the page. Want to keep a web page out of rankings? Allow Google to crawl it (by not restricting via robots.txt), but use a NoIndex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header to indicate that the page should not appear in search results.
- dazc 8y ago
  Not only will google index all those pages you are blocking them from but will also penalise you when they have indexed x number of them. Fix the problem with X-robots-tag, request removal from index (*while such option is available) and then wait for months for the penalty to be lifted.
snthd 8y ago
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb > Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.
larrik 8y ago
Yes, this was the whole point of Google, and how they beat Yahoo, etc.
rtkwe 8y ago
I think so. It definitely seems like a nice shortcut to link together adjacent concepts and queries. If a page talking about a particular topic (but in a different way or with different phrasing) than the original page it could help build out a kind of list of related topics.

Hasn't google has ranked pages for text that appears in links to them but not on them for a long time?

by eli 8y ago

Hasn't google has ranked pages for text that appears in links to them but not on them for a long time?

I don't know about links, but the phenomenon of getting results for a query like: A "B" with no B on the page has been particularly disturbing for some time. At least months, maybe longer, I can't say. I have no idea why they made a change this drastic (it is drastic when someone makes a deliberate effort to say "I need "B" in the page, it's not a whim or a random query" and the search engine shows results which violate the query _syntax_).

goodcharles 8y ago

Yes this is true. Google will rank web pages, based on the inbound links pointing to the page, even if Google hasn't crawled the page itself. This happens regularly when a web page is blocked from crawling via Robots.txt file. Google still indexes and ranks the page, but Google has no idea what is on the page. Want to keep a web page out of rankings? Allow Google to crawl it (by not restricting via robots.txt), but use a NoIndex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header to indicate that the page should not appear in search results.

dazc 8y ago
Not only will google index all those pages you are blocking them from but will also penalise you when they have indexed x number of them. Fix the problem with X-robots-tag, request removal from index (*while such option is available) and then wait for months for the penalty to be lifted.

snthd 8y ago

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb > Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.

larrik 8y ago

Yes, this was the whole point of Google, and how they beat Yahoo, etc.

rtkwe 8y ago

I think so. It definitely seems like a nice shortcut to link together adjacent concepts and queries. If a page talking about a particular topic (but in a different way or with different phrasing) than the original page it could help build out a kind of list of related topics.