Have you set up a Google Sites website ? Beware - it may never appear in Google Searches….
This is by way of a follow-up to my first blog on Google Indexing.
First a quick recap of the background….
I set up one of the new Google Sites offerings last June with the intention of using it as an online repository, primarily to share information and small amounts data with friends and acquaintances.
As the site developed, I added new pages. These were intended to provide some space for more general guides I had been asked for, and to share information on various topics with the wider community. I have to admit I'm not a great social media 'fan' for a number of reasons, so I prefer to use a website and blog for this purpose.
At this point, I wanted to establish whether the site had already appeared on search engine indexes, and if not, what I could do to expedite the
process.
To cut a long story short, I found within the first 3 months that almost every major search engine had indexed elements of my site except Google. Needless to say I was quite surprised by this, given that Google were actually hosting the site, and you might expect them at least to index the site, if not prioritise it.....
How wrong I was …..
My site has been up and running
for almost a year now with significant viewing figures (presumably largely as a result
of searches on other engines), which would seem to indicate that it does contain
material of some interest to the wider public (this is one of the criteria reputed to be used by the Google 'bots' to determine whether a site is 'worth' crawling). Despite this, and much effort on my part to stimulate crawling, there is still no evidence of my site either being
crawled or indexed by Google.
Although there are some sites listed on google searches under the sites.google.com domain, I suspect these are either sites which were initiated pre-switchover and are still left on the index, or more recent ones which have subscribed in some way. The only reasonable conclusion I
can come to from the evidence so far is that Google have blocked their Sites domain (https://sites.google.com/view/) in some way that's not visible to the user. (The global robots.txt file for this domain is inspectable and shows no obvious blockages). If Google have introduced a 'covert' blockage, what purpose might it serve?
An in-depth look at the forum
correspondence on this topic, in an attempt to try and find out why this might have happened, revealed that, of the many
aggrieved users of a ‘new version’ Google site, not one has reported being indexed without first registering a
domain.
Google recently withdrew support
from their original 'Classic' Sites offering and introduced the new version as the only
product available that would be visible on the net. Their write-ups on how to ‘make your site more indexable’ for their new sites now all highlight ‘registering a domain for your site’ as a good way to
do this. This may be a useful clue to what they were intending by revamping
their sites offering.
Given that there's no obvious way to 'transplant' a complete Google site from one domain to another, once a Sites user had set up their new site and added content, this would act as a deterrent to moving the material to another site within a separate domain. By offering the option of buying a domain from Google after the event they hoped that they would be able to take advantage of Sites users in this position. Anyone desperate enough by then to get indexed might well succumb and buy a Google domain. A nice little earner and some welcome extra revenue for the business....
Shutting down the old ‘legacy’ sites, which were indexable, would also help reinforce the incentive to buy a domain, since the conversion of an old legacy site to a new one would automatically remove its content from the index, since the classic sites are no longer visible.
Yet another piece of evidence in favour of the 'domain theory' is the fact that my blog, which does have its own blogspot domain, was crawled and indexed by the Google almost overnight after first going live in February. This confirms that there is plenty of crawling resource in the system, and the problem isn't that the bots are simply overwhelmed with the volume of new URLs coming on stream. A more recent blog post, which was also advertised by a You Tube short video, resulted in both items being indexed and appearing in Google search results overnight.
Given Google Sites are billed as
‘free’ to use, this behaviour if confirmed would be disingenuous, to say the least. Google should in any case be more up-front about
indexing (or in this case the lack of it) in the absence of a separate domain. It is virtually impossible to get any concrete info about the nature of Google indexing and its algorithms, so we are never likely to obtain definitive evidence of this. But if it is what has actually happened, arguably, it is yet another example of a ‘big tech’ organisation
taking unfair advantage of its selling power, and should be widely publicised.
Sadly, despite the fact that the Sites offering is free to set up and does provide a useful online repository for someone on a tight budget, the take-home message on
present evidence has to be:
If you want your online material ever to appear in Google searches, but don’t have the money to pay for a Google
domain, don’t bother wasting your time setting up a Google site……
Viv
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