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I just got one of those emails for the first time about my personal site that's basically my resume. Apparently my text is small on mobile (it's not...) and som

I just got one of those emails for the first time about my personal site that's basically my resume. Apparently my text is small on mobile (it's not...) and some other crap I don't get why google thinks it's acceptable to critique my site without prompting. It honestly just feels rude. They want me to do a whole bunch of micro-optimizations on a site that already works fine because it doesn't fit their standard of "high quality". I think I've gotten exactly 0 clicks from Google search results ever and I don't really ever want any. If it were possible to get a human's attention at Google I'd start sending my own criticism their way but of course it doesn't work like that...

grogenaut 7y ago
Yeah it's amazing how rapidly and rabidly they show up when the complaint is on one of their paid features like a Google cloud (GCE) post for them or a competitor, but nada on the other products. Well no it's actually not surprising.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Google cloud employees are encouraged to go on social media to get a feel for issues users are having and to make the product better. The rest of Google has a policy of "Engineers will probably say the wrong thing if we let them talk in public"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jefftk 7y ago
I was curious what it was complaining about, since https://henryfjordan.com https://henryfjordan.com looks great to me. I tried to run it through Google's "Mobile Friendly Test" but fetching failed [1] because your robots.txt has: User-agent: * Disallow: / This would explain why you've gotten zero clicks from Google (or I would guess anyone else's) search results! On the other hand, it's surprising that you would get a notification if you had crawling disabled. Did you set this robots.txt up recently? [1] https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?id=97_WUiIxx-inLfwyqmbHuQ https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?id=97_WUiIxx-... (Disclosure: I work at Google, commenting only for myself)
- SahAssar 7y ago
  Google seems to see robots.txt as "more what you call guidelines, than actual rules". Sites that block googlebot or all bots with robots.txt still turn up in google searches, just without a description, and are obviously still indexed.
  - dorgo 7y ago
    >"more what you call guidelines, than actual rules" they can index without scraping. It is enough that other websites have links to you site. So the google bot follows the rules in robots.txt to the letter. "no-index" is the way to stay away from google.
    - SahAssar 7y ago
      They can't read my no-index if they obey my robots.txt. Do they break the robots.txt to be able to read my no-index or do they assume my "Disallow: /" means I'm fine with them indexing/linking? Without the noindex part of robots.txt (which google decided to ignore not so long ago) this is not solvable.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    robots.txt is a tool to control crawling, not to specify how you would like your site to be displayed (or not) in search results. If you don't want search engines to include your site, set: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> while to block just Google do: <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710 If Googlebot is not respecting robots.txt, and is crawling something it's been instructed not to crawl, let me know and I can file a bug? (Disclosure: I work for Google but not on Search, speaking only for myself)
    - areyousure 7y ago
      But that requires that Googlebot be allowed to crawl the page in robots.txt in the first place. How do you tell Googlebot to not crawl your site and to not index it either? Previously, one could use the undocumented "Noindex" directive in robots.txt, but this will be disabled soon: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsuppor...
dingo_bat 7y ago
You should mark it spam, because that's what it is.
kaolti 7y ago
Google has grown into a cancerous middleman.
- LowLevelHacker 7y ago
  The transition from search to content delivery was deliberate and not necessary. Google has every right to pivot in any direction but it's when spread too thin that missteps like this are bound to happen.

grogenaut 7y ago

Yeah it's amazing how rapidly and rabidly they show up when the complaint is on one of their paid features like a Google cloud (GCE) post for them or a competitor, but nada on the other products. Well no it's actually not surprising.

londons_explore 7y ago
Google cloud employees are encouraged to go on social media to get a feel for issues users are having and to make the product better. The rest of Google has a policy of "Engineers will probably say the wrong thing if we let them talk in public"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jefftk 7y ago

I was curious what it was complaining about, since https://henryfjordan.com https://henryfjordan.com looks great to me. I tried to run it through Google's "Mobile Friendly Test" but fetching failed [1] because your robots.txt has: User-agent: * Disallow: / This would explain why you've gotten zero clicks from Google (or I would guess anyone else's) search results! On the other hand, it's surprising that you would get a notification if you had crawling disabled. Did you set this robots.txt up recently? [1] https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?id=97_WUiIxx-inLfwyqmbHuQ https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?id=97_WUiIxx-... (Disclosure: I work at Google, commenting only for myself)

SahAssar 7y ago
Google seems to see robots.txt as "more what you call guidelines, than actual rules". Sites that block googlebot or all bots with robots.txt still turn up in google searches, just without a description, and are obviously still indexed.
- dorgo 7y ago
  >"more what you call guidelines, than actual rules" they can index without scraping. It is enough that other websites have links to you site. So the google bot follows the rules in robots.txt to the letter. "no-index" is the way to stay away from google.
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    They can't read my no-index if they obey my robots.txt. Do they break the robots.txt to be able to read my no-index or do they assume my "Disallow: /" means I'm fine with them indexing/linking? Without the noindex part of robots.txt (which google decided to ignore not so long ago) this is not solvable.
- jefftk 7y ago
  robots.txt is a tool to control crawling, not to specify how you would like your site to be displayed (or not) in search results. If you don't want search engines to include your site, set: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> while to block just Google do: <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710 If Googlebot is not respecting robots.txt, and is crawling something it's been instructed not to crawl, let me know and I can file a bug? (Disclosure: I work for Google but not on Search, speaking only for myself)
  - areyousure 7y ago
    But that requires that Googlebot be allowed to crawl the page in robots.txt in the first place. How do you tell Googlebot to not crawl your site and to not index it either? Previously, one could use the undocumented "Noindex" directive in robots.txt, but this will be disabled soon: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsuppor...

dingo_bat 7y ago

You should mark it spam, because that's what it is.

kaolti 7y ago

Google has grown into a cancerous middleman.

LowLevelHacker 7y ago
The transition from search to content delivery was deliberate and not necessary. Google has every right to pivot in any direction but it's when spread too thin that missteps like this are bound to happen.