I took a peek at Google Webmaster Tools. Apparently there are a lot of noindex pages on the Lucire website that they want me to resolve.
Well, folks, if you didn’t put tag index pages so high up for a site: search, I wouldn’t need to have so many. This is to help Google get round its inability to index PHP pages with actual content properly, since it can’t do it for our site or for others’.
It also claimed that we had 16,518 redirects. On probing more deeply, none of those were caused by us or anything we could see to. They were pages that maybe others, like Dlvr.it and Twitter, had used for links, appending (to take the first example) ?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter to the end of the URL. Surely Google, being in the search game, understands this? These are not things that are on the website owner to fix.
What was interesting was that Google is fully aware which pages are linked the most at lucire.com. This begs the question: why isn’t it capable of putting these first in a site:lucire.com search, and instead brings up things that haven’t been linked in nearly two decades? (Interestingly, Startpage is able to show more of these in its top 10, so we know Google can serve them.)
What’s also strange is the home page being in third, which means Google now has a problem understanding a basic convention of HTML pages, where index.html is the home page. (We probably have a lot of internal links to /index.html, which, for 25 years, was absolutely fine. It seems it confuses Google now.)
Google does not seem to function the way we were led to believe any more. It’s confirmation again that sticking to Mojeek is the way to go in the 2020s.
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