Google banned from this site for foul play

Tags: websites.
By lucb1e on 2019-04-12 20:27:30 +0100

Yesterday, I read this article: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed.

The main points are:

• To get more prominent visibility on Google, you can implement AMP. Without AMP, you will never enjoy the prominent placement your competitors might get by implementing it.
  
• Your domain is not displayed anymore when a user clicks on your results: everything goes through Google. It's as if you never leave the search results page.
  
• The AMP code is hosted by Google, of course. Did someone say 'privacy concerns'?
  
• Fast sites become slower with AMP.
  
• This slower AMP site is then also less complete: if you want to do anything with javascript, such as commenting or whatever, Google does not allow that (no non-standard javascript!) so users will have to go to the full site to do that.
  
• Because there is no non-standard javascript, you can only do one of about 30 default things, such as displaying an image fullscreen. There is no customization, you can only do what Google allows.
  
• Google claims it's all open, but the board that decides what the project will do next consists of seven chairs, filled by employees of: google, google, google, twitter, pinterest, microsoft, and pantheon. These are not the companies that need to make money by having good google rankings (not like news websites, for example).
  

There are many reasons to hate AMP and few to love it, but the continuous vocal response from the community that relies on fair search results confirms the damage this is doing. Google is abusing their monopoly to force some technology of their making. I don't know if it violates the letter of any antitrust laws, but I personally do not want to support this kind of behaviour.

Update 2019-06-21: another reason not to let Google access your site: https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyrics-site-genius-com-accuses-google-of-lifting-its-content-11560677400.

Today, I blocked the google crawler from my websites, returning a 403 Forbidden for each request by Google. I do not really care about appearing in search results, so I can safely do this. I know that I alone cannot have a big impact because my sites are not important, but there are some blog posts here and on my other site that people might have been interested in, as well as dozens of little scripts on various paths; there is definitely some content here that is worth finding.

If you want to find this content in the future, you need to use another search engine. Any other search engine. For competition's sake, use another search engine.

I can do this safely, and it hurts Google only a negligible amount. I therefore encourage everyone else with personal, non-profit websites to implement this or similar measures. As fewer results of such not-for-profit websites show up in Google Search, competition will be reintroduced to the search market. We need to remind the monopolist: Don't be evil. They are, however, not listening when we use words.