PLEASE Ignore Google!!!!
I’ve been frying my brain to find the cause of the drop of visitors to my site and I’ve found the culprit – GOOGLE!
Jeez, I need this like a flat tyre on a rations truck between 20 000 famished Ethiopians!!!
OK, so here’s the problem, and I’ll illustrate with screen prints…
In your search to find a driving instructor in the Randburg area, or Sunninghill, or Paulshof, or Fourways, or Bryanston, or ANY of the areas that I cover, you might have been met by the disappointment below (note the +sign that expands the selection):
How ANNOYING! All, – or mostly all – the references told you NOT to visit my site because you will be banned. (I’ll explain at the very bottom)
Now what should that have looked like then, given another perspective?
You see, Google in all its wisdom makes decisions on behalf of us webmasters and site owners and sometimes, as is the case here, we get shafted so badly it’s frightening. OK, so shoot me – I’m NOT prepared to pay a web developer thousands of Rand to build a spiffy site, IF they can’t actually take on the job ethically and honestly devoting their time they profess to have, just to find that mine is on some If-I-Get-To-It List. Been there – done that!
I’ve chosen to do it myself, learn a number of programming languages and coding (HTML, MySQL, PHP and .htaccess, CSS, some Java, etc.) by trial end error just so I can get things done when I need it done…even if that meant 3AM on any given day, whether I’ve eaten or not, slept for an hour, or possibly not either at all.
You see, Google uses what is called DMOZ and its snippet whenever they feel I am or/and you are idiot and we have no clue what we want.
The “snippet” (the short description in black that appears below the title of a page in the search results) is dependant on what the user searched on. So for example, if the DMOZ description of your site mentions Tom Cruise but your page is now more about Angelina Jolie and the user did a search for Tom Cruise, then Google will determine that the DMOZ snippet would be a better fit for that search result. The snippets are search dependant.
Google plays the Psychic Know It All Game!
Now here’s my problem.
There’s a few main scenarios how you can find me if you type a search into Google:
www.aperfectbeginning.co.za – (this proves to be accurate)
site:www.aperfectbeginning.co.za – (no gap between ‘site’ and ‘www’, this proves to be accurate)
site: www.aperfectbeginning.co.za – (note the space between ‘site’ and ‘www’, this proves to be the start of the problem link)
Now expand the +sign shown on the Gauteng Driving School link and all hell breaks loose!!! ALL the links on the search says that you should not visit, or face banning!
FFS Google, the link mentioned in this article is meant FOR SPAM BOTS, it is HIDDEN, a human visitor CANNOT see or visit it on my pages, for GOOD reason!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY, for the love of anything that is holy (numerous expletives withheld), would you think THAT is more relevant to a human visitor’s search for their current interest in driving a car and need of my services?!!!!!!!!!
Please, all you normal humans out there – I have NO CLUE why Google underestimates our intelligence like this – I can only apologise on their behalf.
