I can’t Fix it if I don’t know it’s Broke
July 10th, 2007 by Michael Gray in GoogleIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
C’mon Matt if you take away the supplemental results label how are we ever going to know what’s “broken” in order to fix it
SEOmoz | Google - Please Bring Back the Supplemental Results Query; It’s Incredibly Valuable
I believe it’s good to remove this query because I don’t want people to get fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO. We saw that happen with the toolbar PageRank bar and ended up slowing the update rate on the visible toolbar PageRank to every 3-4 months so that people didn’t spend too much of their time concentrating on PageRank and less on other parts of good SEO.
I get the whole competitive intelligence thing, but what’s the point of organizing all the worlds information you’re going to obfuscate it’s relative value. I like to know what’s broken this way I can decide if it’s important enough to fix.
For example telling me there’s a problem with my car isn’t helpful. Telling me there a small scratch on my bumper or I have a flat tire lets me evaluate it’s severity of the problem and act accordingly.
If you went on a job interview wouldn’t it be helpful if the r person said we didn’t hire you because you have 54 spelling mistakes on your resume, instead of just saying no?
You ask for feedback all the time on SERPS and algo changes why do you think it bad for webmasters to want to know what google thinks of their site?
Sphere It
July 10th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I think Matt should concentrate on what’s important to us webmasters and stop talking about iPhone, Unix sessions, photography, fireworks, etc… See my post about his latest post which is a Unix session tutorial.
http://www.arbitragepayperclick.com/2007/07/10/is-matt-cutts-running-a-unix-shell-tutorial-site-or-a-blog-about-google-for-webmasters
This is getting stupid Matt, please focus and think about who your readers are!
Mike
July 10th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
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July 10th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Whilst I agree that I prefer Matt talking about search & Google, it is his blog.
“I have always been under the impression that this blog was about Google and for webmasters”
A quick look at the categories shows that Matt writes about loads of stuff. Sure he probably gets more readers for the search stuff, but if he wasn’t able to blog about other stuff that he enjoys, there might be a danger he stopped blogging altogether.
July 10th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
And hiding the information doesn’t stop the problem. People are still fixated on PR. People will still be fixated on supplemental results. They just won’t have the information to fix the problem.
It’ll become the de facto excuse why a site isn’t doing well. “Oh your pages don’t rank because they’re all supplemental” And without the data to prove that people will mistakenly fixate on it.
Michael on another note this post is showing up twice in my reader. I see this one has -2 at the end of the URL. The original is still showing though. I figured if you didn’t know you wouldn’t be able to fix it.
July 10th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
The query still works for me …
http://www.google.de/search?q=site%3Awolf-howl.com+***+-as29ksk&hl=en
Hmmmm. What’s up with that?
July 11th, 2007 at 10:37 am
I think this site:yourdomain.com *** -sjpked still works…
David
July 11th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Mike, I wanted a concise write-up on screen and didn’t really find one, so I thought I’d write one. This week I wrote about how to subscribe to just my Google/SEO posts if you want:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/so-i-bought-an-iphone/
Plus I added my comments on Udi Manber’s interview just yesterday. Sheesh, you gotta give me a little bit of a chance to talk about things other than search.
July 11th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
@matt what you want a life or something?
July 12th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Still works for me too…