Comment by twblalock
8 years ago
Don't assume people didn't read the link. It's against the guidelines here and frankly it's insulting. People can read the same article and still have different opinions.
8 years ago
Don't assume people didn't read the link. It's against the guidelines here and frankly it's insulting. People can read the same article and still have different opinions.
The third sentence explicitly states what rule Pinterest breaks....
That's not one of Google's rules, as far as I can tell. Here are some of Google's rules: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/open-we...
Some might say that Pinterest's behavior is covered under the "Spam and Malware" section on that page, but clearly Google does not agree with that interpretation of Google's rules or else the search results would have been removed by now.
There are other sites requiring logins that appear in Google results, e.g. LinkedIn, and Google clearly doesn't see that as a rule violation either. If that was really a rule, Google would need to block a lot of major news sites as well, e.g. NY Times, WSJ, FT, Economist, etc. I'll believe Google's interpretation of their own rules, rather than someone's interpretation on Reddit.
> "Google search results reflect content on the web"
That's what's being violated. The GoogleBot gets the content, but not a human visiting the site. That's not what a user expects. That's why Pinterest and LinkedIn should be removed from Google search indexes.
Addendum We're not even talking about violating Google's T&C here. It's about how their ranking algorithm works. Try building a site and applying similar black-hat SEO tactics and watch your traffic disappear. Not for them.
3 replies →
Cloaking -- presenting different content to a search bot than you would a visitor -- is against Google's rules, and many sites have been removed over the years for that reason. That they aren't currently removed hardly demonstrates that they've assessed whether it's allowed or not, and is specious logic.
If the search results lead to frustration -- and every pinterest result does -- that doesn't help Google. Ergo, those sites eventually get removed.
Webmaster Guidelines - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769
> Avoid the following techniques: [...] Creating pages with little or no original content [...] Cloaking
arguably apply to Pinterest to varying degrees. Specifically:
> Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.
Different results than what I expect is 100% how I would categorise my encounters with Pinterest in Google results.