I spend a ton of time working on SEO aspects of sites I work on. I’m also a pre-release team member over at vBSEO, a 3rd party SEO software add-on for vBulletin forums. Today, I question why I do this.
The ‘big daddy’ Google can’t even seem to get their sub domains correct.
ie,
http://maps.google.com/webmasters/
http://mail.google.com/webmasters/
and
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
all go to the same place.
Both the maps and mail sub domains should 301 re-direct to regular www.
This is an epic duplicate content failure on all accounts. It is possibly the greatest oxy-morons of all time. No one “searches” for Google (ok, maybe a few random’s go to Yahoo.com and search for “google” to get there…), so they seem exempt from anything relating to SEO. Yet, their algorithms penalize websites with duplicate access points.
This is not a difficult ‘final tweak’ either. This is an entry level SEO consideration. Moreover, it can have negative effects on the application itself, such as cookies hitting mix-matched domains.
Maybe Matt Cutts will grace us with a reply here 
Tags: 301, duplicate content, google, SEO
read somewhere that you’ve been doing wonders being an entrepreneur ??
good going, how did you manage to exceptionally well Brian?
I wouldn’t say exceptionally well… but I’m doing ok. It’s a tough market out there right now. No one wants to pay good money for quality work it seems. I find myself out bid all the time, only to later be contacted again to clean up someone’s hack job.
Like anything else, you get what you pay for
They can do this because they are Google. What we SEO analysts do, we do to please G.
And the reason all of us try to rank on G rather than on bing.com or yahoo.com (despite that fact that G is constantly making it difficult for us with their constant algorithm changes) is that 85% of the poeple use Google…
So google can have messed up domains.. but we cant
same is the case with their adsesne domain
No word from mr cutts, but im sure there is a reason for this 301 and canon issue-can anyone think of why its been done like this?
Canonical tag to the rescue.. Or go straight to the big G’s sandboxed. Google caffiene what? Oh. that thing.. yeah yeah…
We live in Sacramento, not too far from Google headquarters. Our cousin works in Mountain View.
Word is that the reason there is so much mystery about Google and their “system” relative to SEO is that with so many computer programmers, no one person really knows what effect his or her subroutines will have on the overall database in terms of page rank or any other aspect.
That makes sense to me as a programmer. I used to work for a State department, and over time, the programs we used were passed along from generation to generation (one generation being about a year).
It didn’t take too long before a program was so large and so complex that a newbie just left the code the way it was and added a subroutine.
That meant that if something broke, it was really hard to fix it without just programming around the problem. We were slowly creating a Frankenstein monster.
It is inevitable, and in the meantime, people treated our department as if we were so smart, we had an explanation for every quirk of the system. That we were planning these effects. Nothing like that was happening at all.
Same with Google. They just don’t know, even on the inside. In a way that is good. But, in another way, the rumors one hears just add to the Godlike quality of Google’s reputation, when in fact, no one will ever know for sure.
We live in Sacramento, not too far from Google headquarters. Our cousin works in Mountain View.
Word is that the reason there is so much mystery about Google and their “system” relative to SEO is that with so many computer programmers, no one person really knows what effect his or her subroutines will have on the overall database in terms of page rank or any other aspect.
That makes sense to me as a programmer. I used to work for a State department, and over time, the programs we used were passed along from generation to generation (one generation being about a year).
It didn’t take too long before a program was so large and so complex that a newbie just left the code the way it was and added a subroutine.
That meant that if something broke, it was really hard to fix it without just programming around the problem. We were slowly creating a Frankenstein monster.
It is inevitable, and in the meantime, people treated our department as if we were so smart, we had an explanation for every quirk of the system. That we were planning these effects. Nothing like that was happening at all.
Same with Google. They just don’t know, even on the inside. In a way that is good. But, in another way, the rumors one hears just add to the Godlike quality of Google’s reputation, when in fact, no one will ever know for sure.