Warnings Google Needs to Incorporate
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We are all familiar with the warning labels on every day products we use such as the ones telling you not to pick up the lawn mower trim your hedges, though seemingly benign these signs are placed there because not everyone has the equal amount of knowledge or even common sense.
As an everyday product, Google should also carry such warnings and cautions for it’s users. Not everyone is as familiar with their products as internet savy SEO’s, webmasters, and the PhDs that run it. With that said, I have come up with some labels they should consider…
PageRank
Instead of that deceptive little tooltip, “PageRank is Google’s view of the importance of this page” they should show one of the following.
Site: Query Modifier
When a user uses the site: command to see what pages are indexed on a site they should be given the warning:
Link: Query Type
When a user, misguided as they may be, attempts to use Google to find the pages that link to a site this warning would be appropriate.
Related: Query Type
For a user that thinks they may actually find a web page that is similar to another using the related: query, they should be shown this warning first.
Page One Results
It’s time Google came clean on the first page of results, a little honesty can go a long way to building trust. This warning should show up on the top of the page, next to the Google logo.
Preferred Cloaking Partners
It’s lesser know fact that some sites are above the law and can cloak their content to Google such that they’ll be indexed and ranked on content behind a log-in page, they’ve decided to not abolish this practice nor include a “subscription required” tag, so to that end I offer the following label.
Google Webmaster Tools
Webmasters are inspired to sign-up and utilize the Google Webmaster Tools because of all of the great statistics they provide. What is not clearly defined is that those statistics are only available if you’ve got a ridiculously high PageRank and when show they are extremely out-dated.
Google Reader
In the interest of full disclosure new users of the Google Reader should be forewarned of its lack of functionality.
Google Webmaster Help Group
Webmasters are constantly conned into the belief that they may actually get some official help from Google on their official help group. The reality is that you will more likely find active Googlers on private blogs and forums that sponsor open bars at SEO conferences.
The last one is not related to Google other than the great Matt Cutts recommends that
Once a user has done a certain number of posts/edits, or has been around for long enough to build up trust, then those nofollows could be removed and the links could be trusted. Anytime you have a user that you’d trust, there’s no need to use nofollow links.
Apparently the thousands of comments on his blog are from untrusted and unreliable sources as he still has all of them nofollowed. If you operate such a blog where you cannot take the time nor care to watch the links on it, then this label should be prominently displayed on top of every page.
Of course I appreciate my commentators and will editorially accept links that are left in my comments.
This post could not have been completed without the excellent web tool of the warning label generator. Please feel free to create your own and share with everyone!
On August 16th, 2007, g1smd said:
