John Honeck

I have been quite busy with other stuff and have been quite derelict in my duty as a blogger. Hope to find more time/inspiration/desire in the near future.

In the meantime….

• Google, PLEASE fix the Webmaster tools so that the statistics regarding home page crawling, the cache links, and what Goooglebot sees are at least close to reality. I realize you’ve got limited resources with only a few hundred thousand computers and all but at least set aside some computing time to push fresh data weekly on a Monday at 1:00 pm or something. The GWHG is inundated with people who get the wrong impression of their sites performance based on this data. Considering that probably only a very small percentage of the confused masses actually find their way to the GWHG I would say that your tools are statistics are actually hurting more people than helping. At some point when a tool becomes harmful it really ceases being a tool. If resources are a problem then I suggest a disclaimer placed within the webmaster account stating that the statistics provided are not up to date and generally wrong and for amusement only. People respect the quality of Google’s index and expect a certain amount of quality with their other offerings, webmaster’s tools while innovative and well intended, are doing more to harm that reputation than help it.
• There was a Sebastian siting. I wish he’d finish taking over the world or whatever he’s doing, I miss his presence.
• You should consider joining Adam Lasnik’s Question of the Day room over at friendeed. While not search related at all it provides some good entertainment and insight It combines Adam’s elegant style as a writer with the preciseness of a programmer and his philosophic outlook on things,
• While you are at it join me on friendfeed.
• Or Plurk
• Or Twitter
• Or Facebook
• John Mueller lasted a little over three days without posting on his vacation. He is incredible.
• Barry can’t find the source of the spiders.
• Speaking of spiders, and I was, example.com has a robots.txt that includes:
  • User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

  • Yet Google has indexed over 15,700 URLs for the site. A fine example of how robots.txt is a crawler directive and not to be used to limit indexing of content and how ineffective a 404 is at removing indexed content. (there is money to be made in that last statement, maybe I should write a post about that?)