Google’s broken all over the place

So, anyone who was watching their email over the weekend or conducting searches on Google (so, unless you live under a rock) probably noticed that Google for a time said that everysite on the internet could potentially harm your computer. While a clear error, I think as performance art it was  brilliant and, frankly, I wish they had tried to cover up by calling it such.

Reporter: So, Matt, it looks like you screwed up utterly this weekend.

Matt Cutts:Actually, it was a post-modernist statement about the way that technology in general and the internet in particular affect our being. To spend time online is to choose to spend precious resources, i.e. time, generated power, attention and so forth, on the pursuit of information for information’s sake rather than the pursuit of one’s true passions and loves. Personal connection is lost to data connections that satisfy only a need to gather information and not the true yearnings of a man’s soul.

Thus, all sites are in fact potentially damaging to both one’s computer by using little of its life to retrieve it, malware or none, and to one’s self. Google’s performance this weekend was just making an effort to correct the balance.

Reporter: …

See? Much better.

Crazier yet, Google is apparently moving towards making their search results AJAX instead of HTML to throw off rank checkers and, I don’t know, prove that they really do like AJAX even though they can’t crawl it.
Really odd for Google to give so blatant an endorsement to a technology that their crawlers abhor, especially one that’s just going to slow down the process. Makes one wonder if these two are connected. Ruh roh, Shaggy.

Myself, I’m still getting the HTML results, and while it’s a potential game changer I’m trying not to panic. If it does strip away the ability to quickly and easily check ranks I think it’ll actually help the process. True, seeing ranks improve over time for a body of keywords is a great help to showing value but if that gets stripped away, both SEOs and clients will be instantly weaned off what is in the end a vanity stat and be forced to focus instead on what really matters: Traffc and conversions. In the end, nothing else matters if your campaign produes – or doesn’t produce – these two vitally important metrics.

Both sides will be forced, and be able, to spend more time analyzing real results and looking at other ways it affects a site’s business – e-mail signups, trips to location finders, RSS subscriptions, etc – in order to find new ways to express SEO’s value. SEO engagements, and the industry as a whole, will be better for it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to go update my resume.

Update (1:04 PM): Apparently, this shreds your analytics results too. Oh shit. Now it’s on.

Forget clients, you think that the Omnitures and Coremetrics of the world are going to stand for this? It’ll be very, very interesting to see if this ‘test’ goes much further than this.

Mom says there are no posts that are like me. I am unique.

Tags:   fail · Google · Google sucks · SEO results Share on Twitter

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