Extreme word of Warning - Google Newsfeeds

[tobyt]

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Just a word of warning for anyone that is interested.

Thought I had a bright idea the other day. Thought I'd try installing G's RSS newsfeeds on a whole series of my product related pages, the idea being that with selecting UK-specific news on that particular product category, I would be enhancing the content on that page with specifically targetted "latest news" content. It would be good for me with the content being automatically refreshed every hour, and it was really intended to provide something extra for the customer. Of course it was anticipated that the targetted content would also assist in helping with the rankings.

Wow was I wrong!

Within 4 days ... yes just 4 days, every one of those page links on G where I had done this, lost its Title and Description and ended up with simply the link showing - even the cache disappeared.

What a disaster!

What the hell is Google thinking of in providing these newslinks for people to use, when it it has such disasterous results.

I've tried many new things over the last 8 years but nothing that I have ever done (including playing with Black SEO tricks) has brought about such swift and dire results.

DO NOT USE GOOGLES RSS NEWSFEEDS!!!! (why does my dislike of Google increase day by day, month by month)

[purple]

I read in the T&C you could not use them on commercial sites. The penalty seems very severe.

Why they could not just tell you to take them down from a commercial site.

[tobyt]

I think the fact that this penalty happened so quickly just reveals more of the nasty hidden features of the more recent Google algo updates.

The whole situation with G is becoming completely ridiculous in that Google was in their heydey a real step forward in the search engine market, but now the momentum has taken them in a whole different direction. By this I mean that Google was originally a step forward in that it provided access to a much broader range of information on the net within a much narrower time scale. Now it is going the other way in that Google is being arrogant enough to decide and dictate what they think the world wants to see - which is totally contrary to what it was all originally about.

Personally I am doing a whole lot more with MSN now if for no other reason than I put a new site up today and will see it on the MSN rankings within 48 - 72 hours - and without any tricks being necessary. That same page will take upwards of 3 weeks to appear in Google - if I'm lucky. So if anything Google has becoming a slow and pretty uncontrollable monolithic structure that is now to a large extent defeating its original aims and objectives. You might say it has gone from supporting freedom of speech to being completely restrictive in what it chooses to publish and what it allows its users to see.

Sadly it will take a while before the general public wakes up to this and realises that Google has become nothing more than another marketing operation whose sole aims is to rip as much money off as possible - and stuff quality search results.

After all if their original claims of caring about providing the best sets of search results possible was really still their aim, why would they take the steps of patenting its search technology..... certainly is not the actions of a group that cares about improving search engine quality. And quite similar to the difference between MSN and Linux.