May 18, 2006

Google: Your website isn’t important enough

by Brian Turner

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Google

Google have denied that Google faces a server crisis – but instead claims that a new indexing system will only prioritise for the most important websites.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt had been quoted by the International Herald Tribune last week as stating that Google faced a server crisis, and was no longer able to store all the data Google needed – and Google founder Larry Page was quoted by eWeek as stating the problem had taken them “by surprise”.

Now Google engineer and Public Relations spokesman, Matt Cutts, has claimed that there is no crisis or problem – but that only links from the most popular sites will be followed and indexed.

Additionally, sites considered to be of “low quality” will no longer have much of their content indexed by Google, and links to these sites – unless from high traffic pages – may be ignored.

The claim goes against Google’s previous attempts to posture against Yahoo! about the size of their index.

Google had previously stated that they aimed to crawl as much of the internet as possible – but now they appear to be claiming instead to only want to crawl a fraction of it.

The comments have been criticised by webmasters, many of whom feel they are being punished or penalised, simply for not having the most biggest and most popular websites on the internet.

Whether Google really is trying to deal with a server crises, or is simply developing a new long-term method of recording information about the internet, it can only be worrying for new businesses.

It has been increasingly difficult for new websites to develop any kind of presence in Google for the short-term, and it hasn’t been helpful that Google have encouraged websites to look for links – only to then attempt to devlaue those links regardless.

This is all the more underlined by Google’s sheer dominance of the UK search industry, with Hitwise recording Google as having a 75% of market share in search.

If Google continues its policy of preferring to provide information only on the biggest and most popular websites, this could have a very real and damaging effect on UK business.

Discuss this in the Platinax Business forums: Google’s New Indexing System.

Questions? Discuss this in our Internet Business forums for help and advice

Story link: Google: Your website isn’t important enough

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