Google Site Links: A Disastrous Experiment

You may or may not know that Google has made a recent change to their Search Engine Reults (SERPs) to show Site Links. If Google likes your site, it'll show up to 8 extra links to your site, to important pages within your site to help users find stuff if they are searching for your Site Linked keywords. In theory, this is a great idea. In practice, it's a disaster and I'll show how so and out a few websites in the process (sorry in advance).

Google Site Links seem to only happen to the homepage of a given site; apparently under some poorly formed theory that the homepage of a site contains far more information than the subpage of any other website on the planet. Google, errantly, believes that a site focused on "mortgage" for example, is going to have more information and be more relevant than a site that focuses on "real estate" as well. Does this really make sense? Of course not.

Google Site Links also reward bad behavior. In order to push Site Links out there, Google has apparently decided that domain name relevance is a primary factor for ranking. You'll notice, more and more, than homepages rank top 10 for important keywords. The unintended result is that Google is filled with poorly designed sites (spam usually), doorway pages, and duplicated content, just to fulfill the mission of pushing Site Links.

Let's take some examples of this. Searching for "growing tips" at Google.

Notice the SERPs that I've highlighted. Each of these domains are doorway pages to a third site and contain very little (if any) useful content of their own. They are simply designed to gain inbound links to a third website. And now, these domains (probably owned by the same person, I'm too lazy to check) dominate the top 10 on this result because each contains "growing tips" in their domain name.

Let's do another search. "Kitchen Gadgets" at Google.

Notice the two domains I've highlighted here. Each of these domains are identical content. The linked title is the same. The websites are the same when you visit as well. Why are two domains, same content, being rewarded? Because they have kitchen gadgets in the domain name, it'd seem.

I could go on with hundreds of other searches showing questionable content like this; but I think the point is quite clear. Google, with their Site Links are rewarding:

• Spam/Doorway Pages
• Domain Squatters
• Cobwebbed Sites

You can also peruse the Google results and see that sites that haven't been updated since 2004 are ranking top 10 because of their domain name as well. All this, while Google wields a 950 hammer on sites that have violated some arbitrary (and sometimes unknown) law at Google. Real webmasters are being hurt by a penalty that isn't understood, isn't fixable (in many cases) while sites that have no apparent value are rising to the top on a whim. When you add the apparent lack of communication from Google these days, and their stream of buying businesses that are out of their scope, you are forced to wonder, "What is going on down at the Googleplex?" Google still hasn't fixed its problems in regards to duplicate content (it still cannot reliably figure out who posted content first and who stole it), it has not figured a way to keep proxies from hijacking domains from the SERPs, nor has it been able to even get malware sites delisted from its index. Yet, it's added a cute feature that has further detiorated its index and elevated questionable sites for a little eye candy.

Google's priorities are seriously out of whack.