A couple of thoughts about Google's new sidewiki.
There are already a lot of webmasters, advertising professionals, and business owners who are asking — actually demanding — an opt-out mechanism to block sidewiki from your site.
Now, Google points out two things:
- A webmaster can claim the first spot, the first comment that is shown on a page.
- They will algorithmically solve abuse problems.
- But you cannot opt-out.
Okay,let's see.
I follow the example which Google gives in their help pages and check their own webmaster's entry on their toolbar blog.
Looks good, and the lesson on the side is,
you can use a lot of vertical space and push the third party comments off the page so that users need to click
next.
But that's all, no more good from here.
- I'm not sure if I can edit this webmaster's comment any time I want, later. Can I delete it once created?
- The Google account under which the site is registered with webmaster central is not the account I wish to use for this purpose.
Think like a corporation for a second or even a small to medium sized business could run into this problem. Most likely it's not the IT guy's job to write this kind of content. And it definitely needs to be updated on a regular basis. It's like ad space) But whose Google account is used. And it's always linked to Google profile by the way.
Honestly, I don't even want my Google account which I use for Analytics, AdSense, Adwords, Webmaster Tools to have a public profil. Call me security paranoid. This is okay. I simply don't want it. What can Google offer me instead.
- It gets even worse. Look at the screenshot below.
Where is the webmaster's comment?
Either I have to write one for each page individually or the one I write does only appear on the homepage. Very bad. Imagine you have a site with lots of traffic, lots of comments on sidewiki (like Seth Godin got some nasty feedback that way). What are you gonna do. Hire someone who joins the conversation and does damage control?
A lot of flaws, too many for my taste.
Improving Sidewiki - My Proposal
From a usability standpoint of view and as a marketer I propose the following changes. I admit you cannot stop people talking about you. And in most cases it's a good thing, but we know that a few “bad people” can do more harm than you might think at first.
- Allow complete opt-out and disabling of sidewalk for your site. Important: without having to pay a fee!
- Some additional options for displaying a webmaster's comment on deep pages without having to write one for each individual page.
- Being able to configure a individual, different Google accounts for being in charge of maintaining those site webmaster comments.
- A feature that I can monitor all comments for my site easily. I won't traverse my entire site every day to check if someone left a comment on sidewiki.
As a user I already turned sidewalk off. Honestly, I am not so interested in this chatter/jabber. And I am not sure about it's SEO value so far. It's just another time thieve, right now.
The Truth
It is true that you cannot stop people talking about you or your business on other websites like Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo. But do you have to tolerate this on your own website?
Copywriter Paul Myers goes more into detail (↑) of that aspect and has written an excellent rant about the potential negative side-effects of sidewiki. He writes about some positive ones too, but the positives one are not scary, …
Paul Myers actually points out the scenario where you pay Google for the traffic to your site, and a sneaky not so ehtical affiliate marketer steals it and you have to pay him commision on top of what you paid Google already. Well, it really can get nasty.
Let me know what you think. Retweet, share this post and have a good day.
Yours
John W. Furst
P.S.: Update: I think in this case not even modifying the
robots.txt file to keep out Google would help, since they don't need to crawl your site in order to make this toolbar trick work.
P.P.S.: I have seen some dumb attempts to block sidewiki, like:
- Configuring the web server for not serving the content to users who have the toolbar installed. Instead redirecting them to a page which explains that they should disable the toolbar and reload the page. Come on, nice try but how many visitors will follow you?
- Messing up the URL with some JavaScript magic somehow that sidewiki get's confused and cannot handle your site anymore.
Well, chances are that this causes a lot of confusion among users, Google's and other search engines indexes, … in short that breaks your site AND is already confirmed that it does not work with Wordpress.
http://blog.fcon21.biz/comment.php?type=trackback&entry_id=273
This post was mentioned on Reddit by marvin566: The topic is controversial. This author thinks Google might be evil or sidewiki is at least bad implemented.
Tracked: Oct 23, 18:55