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by billpatrianakos 5326 days ago
I see your point and maybe my attitude toward it is totally biased or morally/ethically off balance but I think it's just fine.

PG knows his shit. He knows how to block crawlers, he knows how get SEO done, he's no dummy. "So what?" you say. Well I work in web development and I meet with people all the time and explain to them how to run a site and get rankings up, etc. I tell them I'll give them the tools, show them how to use them and even leave detailed manuals on how to work everything. These people are so into it at our first meeting and they're excited to get into it and work this stuff.

Then the job is done, the tools are handed over, and the lessons are learned. What do they do? Nothing. Then they do nothing. Then even more nothing. The site is never updated and they do no maintenance whatsoever and eventually it becomes outdated and dead for all intents and purposes. A year later they want to know why they're not ranking in Google. I ask if they've checked or even once used any of the tools I gave them and the answer is always no. Then they demand I fix it. I kindly remind them they're the ones who wanted to have Larry in accounting run the site because he's "good at computers" and to save money by not hiring an IT guy.

So the point I'm making is that I'm sure there are a ton of people out there who are trying to get customer service without trying to help themselves or using the resources readily available. I think it's great that Google is showing they're willing to help those who help themselves.

I think google isn't treating everyone equally but they are treating people fairly. There's a difference. I'd prefer fairness. Not all "customers" are created equal so you compensate by treating them with fairness instead.

2 comments

PG knows his shit. He knows how to block crawlers, he knows how get SEO done, he's no dummy.

Apparently he doesn't use Google Webmaster Tools, though.

It seems he doesn't want to. From what I understand there's the possibility that he'd prefer to accomplish his goal without the use of Wemaster Tools. Like I said, he knows his shit, so he's going to do things on his terms if he can. Webmaster Tools might be what the average guy wants to use but then there are some who follow the beat of their own drummer whenever possible for whatever reasons we may never know.
This fiasco is not good evidence for pg knowing his shit. If he wants to block bots and he doesn't want to use the tools provided to make that work, maybe HN should be #10. It's even behind the wikipedia article describing it. Which is actually not bad for a dead site.
Speaking of knowing ones shit your site listed in your profile billpatrianakos.com is dead - no dns being returned.
I know about that and it's on purpose. There's a number of reasons I want it that way for now. Way to be snarky for no particular reason. I didn't know offering up a sincere comment about PG roused so much emotion.
Actually I wasn't being snarky. Stuff like this happens and many times the owner of the site doesn't know it since they are using a local cached copy from their browser as only one example or the dns is cached so they are the last to find out. I was just pointing it out. And the only reason I saw it was that I read your comment. (Really) I see you've now removed the domain name from your profile now.
Yeah, I did. Sorry, I took that wrong. That used to be a working domain when I first had it in the profile. I just pointed the name servers to another hosting account but I'm not quite ready to do anything with it which is why it was dead. Thanks for reminding me it was in my profile though. I did forget that.
PG: "A couple weeks ago I banned all Google crawler IPs except one"

With regard to this issue doing the above is not evidence of knowing your shit in the area in question.

To be honest, I disagree. The fact is that people who know their shit shoot themselves in the foot occasionally. That's how they come by the shit they know. Timid people rarely know their shit because they are too afraid to make mistakes.

Being bold is an important aspect of getting to know your shit.

Also, besides this, this action has gotten us talking about how Google throttles crawling, and this discussion has further reduced my opinion of the World's Largest Adware Vendor.

Now if I were to ban Google searchbots based on what PG is saying I would simply limit them to the first page or two of listing. I think this can be done in a robots.txt?