Comments on: Whitehouse.gov Keeping Searchers From Asking Questions (Inadvertently)

By: Google I/O: New Advances In The Searchability of JavaScript and Flash, But Is It Enough?

Fri, 29 May 2009 18:15:16 +0000

[...] Google tools are to developers. Sure, the AppEngine servers running Google Moderator held up, but none of the discussion could be crawled or indexed by search engines. Maybe this didn’t matter to the White House (although I would think that some American [...]

By: How to link to an individual question in Google Moderator | JasonMorrison.net

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 08:09:54 +0000

[...] not quite so cool is that Moderator apparently doesn’t play well with the rest of the web. I’m not sure why it was designed this way (and if I did know, I probably couldn’t tell [...]

By: Terry

Terry — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:27:01 +0000

I don’t think whitehouse.gov cares or even needs SEO. I wouldn’t doubt if they were deliberately snubbing it. After all it’s whitehouse.gov. There’s a lot of smart people over there and I would venture to guess they know the basics. There also have an on-site search engine, not sure where it comes from. Definitely not Google but it works. If I need something from the White House and I want to be sure it’s from the White House I can go there and get it. As for the Town Hall thing, do you really want to stuff commercial search engines with 100,000 of mostly redundant questions? I go to search engines to get answers. Anyway I’m guessing this is probably some kind of temporary page so perhaps they don’t want a bunch of 404’s if they deactivate it for later use under a different topic. They are actually doing search engines a favor. I for one like the site. I’m sure Google will archive that stuff somewhere since it was their API but probably not in the regular SERP’s.

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:02:44 +0000

Keonda,

Thanks!

There’s a couple of things going on with the URLs that aren’t ideal. The first is that if you go to whitehouse.gov/openforquestions and click on any of the topics to the left, the URL doesn’t change. That’s how most people will navigate.

If you break out of the frame, as you did, you can get unique URLs (which at least will help with sharing), but those still can’t be indexed because the unique portion of the URL comes after a #. Since those normally signify anchors within a page, search engines don’t index them. They truncate the URL to end just before the #.

By: Keonda

Keonda — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:58:15 +0000

Vanessa, fantastic investigation!

Why did you write “Another of Google Moderator’s drawbacks is that it doesn’t provide a unique URL for each topic”? I can see a link to a moderator.whitehouse.gov URL for each topic — check Education for instance. Isn’t this a permanent link? I agree that a link to each question would be best though (and preferably without noindex, nofollow meta)

Anyway, I am happily surprised that one doesn’t have to sign in with a google account before participating!

By: Alan Bleiweiss

Alan Bleiweiss — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:59:06 +0000

Vanessa, I love your ability to dig and discover. A couple days ago I was at the White House site and decided to see how well it’s optimized in general. It turns out it’s not. By a long shot. A friend said “well they’ve probably got enough back-links”… Uh, how many times can it be emphasized that back-links alone do not a quality SEO plan make”?

I did just a random check to see what phrases people might be using to find info that clearly should result in the White House site coming up. Phrases that students might use, for example.

American President – they come up fifth
leader of America – not found

Later on I tried a couple dozen phrases and many had the same results.

Like for the term
American Vice President – one entry in the 9th position – and it’s a press release from February. a 14,000 transcript (yes I checked the word count) of remarks made by the President and Vice President made at a museum in Denver. OMG

The main site’s optimization is awful. Like for the main landing page on the current administration’s agenda, the title is “The Agenda” seriously! And the Fiscal Agenda page – the title is

Fiscal

The Meta keywords field is filled with single words, overstuffed, and the Meta description on every page is the same (and it’s 267 characters long).

I know that there’s a really good chance that people will type a longer phrase, which will probably include “White House” or “Obama”. And that someone who gets to the site could then eventually find their way around.

Yet I can’t help but think about the fact that they’re missing so much of an opportunity. It’s just sad.

As much of a challenge as it would be to optimize the newest features and areas of the site, at least they could hire an intern to work on the basics couldn’t they?

By: Jon Garfunkel

Jon Garfunkel — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:36:56 +0000

Amazing… GoogleMod is not SEO.

They could have gone with Yoosk, but it’s not made in the USA.