Google is DONE

SEO GURU AND OWLCROFT

Below is a quote from Owlcroft

"Nonsensical or frivolous lawsuits will not change any of that".

Owlcroft, I have great respect for your intellegent posts, but do you think that Warren Buffett files as you call them "Nonsensical or frivolous lawsuits"

Please do not insult yourself by such statements.

Trademark lawsuits have a lot to do with traffic redirection (so called Florida update) that Google has engaged in since 11/2003

You simply have not done enough research, like you said you took a quick look at the link and "claim" it is a cheap National Enquirer type of publication.

I think that if you take the time to do your research, even a intelligent man as yourself can learn something new.

Your posts give a lot of insight, I just think you are behind on current events and that is what that cheap National Enquirer website can provide for you.

Getting back to Google traffic redirection (some folks call it "the Florida Update" mostly SEO Experts) look at http://www.webcenter.squarespace.com another cheap National Enquirer site as you call them, and tell me what you think of this traffic redirection study.

You really need to look into the traffic redirection issue and the Trademark lawsuits before you make broad statements that are not relevant to current events.

 

I saw a rumor several months ago on one website that would take care of any concerns about Google (or other search engines) breaking copyright. It claimed that Google was considering REQUIRING a robots.txt in order to spider a website. Seems a simple enough way to me to say that they have permission from the website owner to crawl and use the information on the website. No robots.txt, no crawl.

Such a move would no doubt cause a great deal of havoc on the next update, however, as websites without robots.txt or ones that are forbidden (apparently an issues, from what I've read) suddenly find themselves dropped completely. I don't know what percentage of sites have a robots.txt, but I've certainly seen plenty without.

Wonder who'd complain louder... anthonycea about copyright infringement and other issues with Google now, or the people who would lose out by such a move then.

 

SF, I did not bring up the copyright issue, our most brilliant member (I ain't kidding) SEOguru did. So give him the Glory.

Next, I think rules like that would be good, if you want your sites added to the index put up a green light, cool.

If you want to keep them out you should have a sure way to do it also.

Thanks for your post, please vote for me I approve your message.

 

I think that would be a huge move on their part. It certainly would help protect themselves against future lawsuits because the robot tag would be the equivalent of an authorization by the web author to index the page. Those without it would not be indexed.

Now just because it may be a smart thing to do, doesn't mean you can count on the boneheads at Google to go through with it. They are still on the hell bent quest to index the ENTIRE Internet. Do they swallow their pride, cut the pages they index in half, and build in another legal level of protection?

Again, they are going Public and must answer to shareholders. Even Google may decide to take the safer road.

Who knows what will happen, but it is an interesting issue. Thanks for bringing it up stephfoster.

 

(Copyright and trademark law are essentially one animal.)

RTFM: Read The Fine Messages (or something like that).

This bizarre Google-ology puzzles me, but I guess everyone needs a hobby . . . .

 

Ok, next question: What reasonably successful (you decide the criteria) search engine does not do at least part of this, and at what point does it become copyright infringement? When they cache it? I don't know who all does cache, is it Google only? When they use page titles and text from the site to describe it? Yes, I'm trying to get the details of exactly when the copyright is infringed, I'm curious!

Then, how would you want search engines to come up with resulte? Just by sites using the robots.txt, as I mentioned above, or do you think there would be other ways for them to legitimately get the information they need in order to perform as search engines?

 

Fair use is one matter, copyright violation is another matter.

If I copy a movie in my home for personal use, that is not a copyright violation.

But if I copy the movie and show it in my bar to my customers, that is a commercial violation of the copyright law, I used it for commercial gain.

So Google right now is considered a copyright violator? I would say no, it would fall under fair use since most webmasters desire that their sites are indexed.

Until webmasters as a group file a complaint the use of these copyrighted websites is fair use under the copyright law. No one is contesting Google's use of these images so they fall under fair use.

What if I took my posts from this forum and put them all in a book, could Shawn sue me, I doubt that he could win if he did since I am the original author of MY posts.

But if I took the entire thread and published it for my own gain, then Shawn could sue the hell out of me and win.

So it depends on who has what rights and how things are used.

You could be sued for linking to some sites if they wanted to push it, but most sites want to be linked to so they do not take action on those that backlink to them.

Where is Shawn and Compar at when you need them?

 

It is an interesting situation Stephfoster. Owlcroft and I have gone over various legal issues including potential case law in this thread. After doing more research (post #19 in this thread) I believe that Google and other search engines are pretty safe under the DMCA for indexing a website's information. Indexing images and displaying thumbnails is also legal.

The problem that could arise is whether Google or any other search engine can link to a page other than the home page.

In the Kelly vs. Arriba Vista case, the court’s description of Arriba’s program could describe the "passive" activities of virtually any automated service that establishes links or creates inline frames between Web sites. Moreover, the Kelly decision does not address the DMCA (17 U.S.C. Sec. 152), which provides immunity, or "safe harbors," from copyright infringement claims when the service provider is merely "passive."

The problem lies in displaying or linking to content in a matter other than the intended display of the author. Sure Google links you to the page, but the “intended display” may include the ORDER in which a viewer sees the information. If you had a link to a Promotional page from your homepage which then linked to a specific product, what happens when Google links someone directly to the product bypassing their promotion? The site owner is getting visitors to a page outside his intended display.

This issue has not been fully defined in court yet (that I know of) but I’m sure it will at some point.

There is also still the case that though snippets of code is considered “fair use” under the DMCA, massive use of this law (in Google’s case, billions of times) may be outside of the law’s original purpose. That would be a tough case to win but it could see a court room as well.

Here is another issue. What if site owners don’t want visitors? Ok, I know it sounds crazy but go with me on this one. You know all websites aren't selling something. Maybe someone put up a website for friends and family and they really do not want that information posted all over the Internet. They could make it password protected but should they have to? Maybe they have a limited budget and are worried about Bandwidth issues. By a search engine sending people to a site that has not actually said it wants visitors that search engine can be costing the site owner money by running up their bandwidth. In some cases (if it is a popular search) it could be a LOT of money.

Yes, they tell you to use the “Robots” and “Noarchive” tags but the question is whether, as a site owner, you should be required to do anything. It could be a novice web developer that has never heard of those tags. I’m not saying that a search engine would lose this case but a case can be made for it. As Owlcroft pointed out in post #20, it isn’t enough for someone to say it is illegal (even if it is) unless they can show that it is causing “nontrivial and nonspeculative or hypothetical harm.”

Now that I just said that it can’t be hypothetical….. Let’s do a hypothetical shall we.

If Google or another search engine lost such a case, how effective would the search engine be? It seems that Google would have three choices.

1. They can show the same results and disable the links thereby skirting around the decision by showing the URL but not linking to it. Of course how many people want to cut and paste URLs into the address bar?
2. They can link to whatever the root domain is of that page. This could be disastrous because who wants to spend hours searching around on a site for a page that you know is there. The site may have thousands of pages and now you have to find the page that contains the information you are looking for.
3. As you suggested Stephfoster, Google could start requiring robot tags to be indexed. This seems like the most obvious solution but Google may think that it will devalue the company by cutting the number of pages that they index by 60% or more. And what kind of SEO spin would it have if you had links from sites or pages that didn't have the robot tag?

I don’t see search engines changing any time soon because of these legal issues. It could take a decade to work it out. Actually, per my other thread “Google vs Microsoft”, Google (as we know it) may not even be around by the time the issue is settled.

 

Well Mel, I am sure it is a problem for a lot of webmasters that do not want parts of their sites captured. Photo's for instance, Google does not always follow those instructions from what I have heard and read.

So it is hard to keep them out even when you wish to by what these articles were saying.

Some folks have made a fuss out of this matter and like SEOguru said some of these things have been in court.

I was just saying that there should be clear rules that everyone can live by.

 

What about ask.com's new thumbnail picture of the website next to search results. That will go even further in "supposed" mass stealing of copyrighted material. But it's a love-hate relationship, because consider how much of your traffic comes from search engines. Now do you really want them to disappear?

 

Since we are using the home and an analogy: Actually, there has been a case or two where the burglars were charged with breaking and entering into a house and they got off on a technicality because the door was unlocked.

This is the same thing with Google... If you don't lock your door then yes, you are inviting them in to "steal" "back-up" your pages.

As for the images.... I had my images directory blocked from Google..... I had to remove the block because I wanted my products in Froogle... Google wrote me and asked me to remove it from my robots.txt and replace it with a few other lines that would allow them to go where they needed to on my pages.

so apparently it does work if set properly.

Now, there was an incident last year and I cannot remember the search engine off hand. I do know that it was not google.... where they updated their search engine and somewhere something got messed up and their robots were ignoring the robots.txt file.

 

I do actually use the nocache on our links pages.... This is due to the use of digitalpoints google API search. It was pulling up everything in the links pages when people would search.... we didn't want that... so I told Google not to make a cache.... that does not stop them from indexing or ranking the pages, to my knowledge, it just stops a cache from being made so they don't pull up in this search anymore near the top anyway.

It also stopped the unwanted unnecessary traffic such as someone searching for metallica gift basket.... and they got our music links page. Boy, we topped number 1 for that highly competitive, highly searched for keyword phrase.....

 

about your whole javascript and css rant....

you think javascript will ruin googlebots? they'll be stuck in never ending loops? not likely. the bots will have to be programmed to stop executing a script after a certain period of time, just like servers do with server side scripts.

do you really think google puts emphasis on where the text is in your code? look at an amazon products page. there's a ton of crap before you get to the content. but still, with little PR and the content far down the page, amazon's product pages rank highly. even if google does put an emphasis on the content higher up in the code, it appears to be so little that it won't make much difference in your rankings and maybe... just maybe... won't be the end of google.

 

Hey trumpet guy, you have to be the biggest idiot ever, do you think that you can just come here and post your retarded message ad in every thread, you are just lucky that Shawn is not here tonight to ban your ass.

Did you pay Digital Point for that advertisement, if not you can expect a bill for a full page ad soon.

The only thing we trumpet around here is webmaster chat man.

Are you sure you are on the right forum?

Maybe you should get on the eyeglasses forum since it seems you may need to get your eyes looked at so you can read the content of a thread.

Or maybe a comprehension forum so you can comprehend the content of the threads, no one is interested in a trumpet lesson.

 

So far as I know the robots.txt file and the googlebot nocache tag both work very well and so do the noindex and no follow meta tags.

So yes, IMO there are clear rules that everyone can live by:

If you want to have your site listed in Google's search, Google will do that for you with little or no effort or your part and better still for free.

If you do not want your site to participate in Googles search, its about a thirty second job to do that with the robots.txt file.

If you want something a bit more custom tailored to your requirements it might take you a couple of hours to create such a custom robots.txt file.

If you want Google to rank you pages highly you will have learn the current rules and work hard from now on.

 

Well, I started reading from the top, and DID end up reading the whole thing.
I am not knowledgeable on the subject at all, and just happen to be in here to learn about it. I must say - fascinating topic, and interesting contributions, thank you.

Being used to not getting anything free in life, this controversy may explain to me why I got a totally surprising top listing on Google for one of my sites (or keywords?).
I have struggled with a 3 week old site to even be noticed, let alone be listed high on Google, and suddenly yesterday my site showed up in 4th spot, and today in 1st and 3rd! I was delirious, at least up to the moment I came across this topic here, and ready to ask for the nearest BMW dealer's address.
Ok, now I understand. I should probably have those brakes on my old clonker fixed instead.

Please accept my apologies if this contribution did not exactly belong in this topic.

 

Thanks a lot for all the useful info.