[alnwlsn]

Actually, I'm pretty sure I've never seen a McMaster link in any search engine. Even if you google a direct McMaster part number, like "91251A449", McMaster will not be among the results. While the url to that product is just https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/

[rbinv]

No idea if intentional or not, but the reason is this noindex directive:

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex, noarchive, noimageindex" />

[dewey]

If you have a lot of product pages (millions) it can make sense to not have all of them indexed by a search engine. If you have pages that are more profitable and might hit more keywords than some very specific product SKU it makes sense to index these primarily.

[spookie]

"Black oxide screw" on the other hand appears.

Those numbers could be anywhere, on completely unrelated things. They are not a good search query.

[alnwlsn]

Maybe, but I never seem to have trouble searching for even further incomprehensible part numbers on other items. Give me a DigiKey part number like "WM7610CT-ND" and google finds it first thing. Digikey is also the first result for the manufacturer part number "0533980671".

For my McMaster example, google gives 9 results, none of which are the McMaster site. That not specific enough? To be fair, I believe McMaster to be fairly protective of their catalog.

At least their part numbers are fairly recognizable - they are usually about 10 characters long, all numbers, with an "A" near the end. That's usually enough to get me to check the McMaster site first.

[btown]

There's an interesting dynamic here: if McMaster part numbers are searchable on Google, people are going to use Google to search for McMaster part numbers, rather than the McMaster site itself. Which gives all its competitors a chance to bid on those long-tail keywords, or optimize for them.

On the other hand, if you train people that if you want to use McMaster part numbers, you have to use the McMaster site... once you have a customer, as long as your site and inventory don't frustrate them, you have a customer for life.

You're sacrificing inbound for retention, in a highly measurable and testable way, for your unique audience and/or subsets of that audience. I have no doubt this is by design.

[Nemi]

This… is brilliant. Google and Facebook are highly lucrative because they designed a system where your profit margins (as a business) are largely sucked up by Google and Facebook by making you bid against your competitors at higher and higher values until someone is willing to give up almost all of their margins to be the top bidder for the favored “top spot”.

Hypothetically, if you make $1 in profit on your product, theory says that some competitor will bid up to $0.99 to secure that sale and if you don’t bid this amount also, your sales will suffer.

The end result is that Google and Facebook end up consuming all the profits for a large number of businesses online that have to survive by advertising, which explains Google’s immense profit margins.

Assuming what you say is true, this is truly a ballsy move by McMaster. Betting that their website is unassailable by their competition and thus such a value-add that they can forgo playing the losing game that Google and Facebook has setup is brilliant. I have such respect for that.

[jaffa2]

Great post very interesting thanks

[throwaway2037]

I am not here to shill for Google, but I cannot believe that Google doesn't have a special arrangement with McMaster to index all of their part numbers! The advertising potential is very good. As a related point, I am almost sure they have special handling for programming searches to prefer StackOverflow over other sources. A few times, SO.com has made some incredibly tiny change to their webpages that made them virtually invisible to Google. After some internal email exchanges, SO.com was "fixed", and again, dominated Google programming searches. (Of course, this was 2010s... long before the AI slop era!)