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BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
URL: PC Advisor
At 7:38 AM on Feb 9, 2006, Rick Ross wrote:
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Markus Sagemann, a spokesman for BMW said, "We see that and we recognise the efforts of Google to do something against this but we also say that one has to [see the] difference in how the doorway page is used."
Sagemann continued to explain that BMW created the doorway pages because parts of its site were created in Java and might not be detected by search engine spiders. In effect, the doorway pages were tryingt o help the spiders find what was available for them to access at the site.
I know this is a problem for many sites, and we have even felt it here at Javalobby. For example, although we did absoultely nothing wrong, our site fell victim to a similar problem with Google. EclipseZone is the world's most popular Eclipse site besides eclipse.org, yet for a long time it did not appear at Google even though they had spidered us intensively. Even now, although there are 113,000 EclipseZone.com pages in Google's index, the site still doesn't have a page rank.
In any case, I thought it was noteworthy that BMW claimed Java was involved in the problem. I wonder how many others are facing similar issues?
27 replies so far (
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Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
We have quite same problems on our sites, they are all written in java using jsp and servlets...I think that most of the problem is when a page makes a redirect for example you redirect in index.jsp to some servlet and process request there... but i realy not know what the real problem is. But I am trying hard to fix this problem becouse our customers are quite unhappy that their online shop doesnt have high page rank....
Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
What a load of crap!"...Search companies often choose not to index content that is written in Java " ... ... " Site designers can use HTML instead..."
Somebody please expain to me how a website written in Java could possibly NOT use HTML? How would it be considered a website if there's no HTML? Does the author even understand what he's writing?
But seriously, does anybody know what this refers to: "content that is written in Java and certain types of JavaScript because some sites use those languages in a way that can crash the search engine"? Are they talking about applets? How else would a search engine be exposed to Java code?
Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
Sure. If you have a lot of your content represented as a Java applet, there's no way for a search engine (which parses HTML output) to see any of the content that's hosted in the Applet. In think using the ALT tags would help here.Flash should have this same problem...content written in Flash would not be seen by the crawler.
As far as Javascript, same problem: some sites output portions of their pages via script. Ajax apps are going to be hit extremely hard by this. The crawler does not process javascript...the crawler is not a browser. Google might want to rethink their policies on how 'the crawler must see the same output as the user'. It makes sense that you a 'well behaved' page should have search indexes that match what the user will see, but it's a limitation of the crawler that can't see what goes on in applets, images or flash to know that a page doesn't have relevance to the keywords.
For JSPs, provided the output of the JSPs is just HTML, there's no problem here. I think the author is being misinterpreted. 'Written in Java' i think means using applets. A jsp's output is HTML and there's no reason why using java or perl or just static HTML would have any different output from a spider's perspective.
-Chris
Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
Rick, # of pages indexed does not have any impact on page rank. Page rank (as I understand it) is a measure of your site's popularity, based mostly on how many incoming links it has from other sites. Plus, the higher the rank of other sites linking to you, the more weighting it gives to your incoming links and thus the higher your rank.This is the largest innovation google brings over other search engines which judge a site on it's own merits alone without considering popularity.
Floyd
Re: AJAX indexing troubles
I have the same problem as bwm.de. I've been asking this question again and again and nobody can answer it.How to have an AJAX site indexed ? The site is 100% AJAX. There is no link. Only one page.
What we're doing today is building another site (only for search engines) that has _exactly_ the same text/image than the AJAX site. The only difference is that you find links to pages which you do not in the AJAX site and that in the plain html site you got a javascript that redirects the user to the AJAX site.
I would like to have some directions on Google's part on how to have a AJAX site properly indexed and not delisted given that I am not trying to boost my page rank. I just want to be (fairly) indexed .... but I have no luck.
Google is not helpful, it doesn't answer. It perfers to look elsewhere and ignore the problem altogether. Sad but true.
Re: AJAX indexing troubles
Did you trying asking the question using Google Answers?Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
Back links shows just three linksJava Blog
Personal Blog
Re: AJAX indexing troubles
IMHO it is bad practice for a normal website to use AJAX to display content . It works for a web application however.Java Blog
Personal Blog
Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
I heard that some Chinese websites are having problems with GoogleRe: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
About Flash: My latest info (dating back a few years) was that Google was able to spider newer Flash versions. I'm not sure about this, but I do believe that I read it at some trustworthy site (webstandards? alistapart? I don't remember).Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
How can they index? What are they going to have search results linked to (via a URL)? If I do a search for some text that they actually were able to index, what state am I going to bring up the Ajax app in via a URL? I just don't think that it is reasonable for them to be able to handle this.However, it's equally unreasonable to threaten de-linking because you have spiders crawling a 'html-rendering' of your application but at the same time, if they click on a HTML-indexed page, when the user searches for it and gets redirected to your site, how are you going to put the Ajax app in the proper state such that they see the content that they were searching for? If you can't do it, you're making google look bad (which is why they have these rules and guidelines about what will get you delisted).
-Chris
Good one
Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
Can't you do a forward with a request dispatcher instead of a redirect? A search engine wouldn't be able to see the redirect happening that way.Re: BMW claims Java involved in Google blacklisting
This problem could probably have been worked around with META keywords. However, that got abused and now it hurts your rank if you have META keywords that don't exist in your page content. I guess you just need to think twice about using Java, Flash, JavaScript, or even images to render text. Or you could just pay for text ads and get the keywords you really want.