The Google URL Inconsistency

This inconsistency causes confusion amongst Google users who might type in a URL containing the product name, but use the wrong format. The classic example of this is Adwords: Type in  www.google.com/adwords/ (with the trailing slash) and you might be astonished to discover:

So, this got us thinking here at First Rate, how many of Google’s products have both the path study and the sub-domain version set up, and how many of them have only one of them set up. And is there any rhyme or reason behind Google’s choice of a sub-domain or a pathname?

First Rate tested the pathname and sub-domain version for 50 of Google’s different services and products.

First Rate tested the following six URL formats:

* http://name.google.com/
* http://www.name.google.com/
* http://google.com/name/
* http://www.google.com/name/
* http://google.com/name
* http://www.google.com/name

The results confirmed First Rate’s suspicions: Many of Google’s products do not have the substitute URL set up:

* 64% of the products had both the sub-domain and path study versions set up (e.g. earth.google.com and www.google.com/earth or wave.google.com and www.google.com/wave).
* 14% had the path study set up but not the sub-domain (e.g. www.google.com/postini/ but not postini.google.com).
* 12% had the sub-domain set up but not the path study – some of the services had the path study set up for the version without a trailing slash, but not the version with the trailing slash.
* 10% had neither the path study nor the sub-domain version set up (e.g. android.google.com and www.google.com/android or insights.google.com and www.google.com/insights).
Sometimes, this was because the product exists on its own domain, (e.g. www.android.com or www.orkut.com) and sometimes it was because the product in question has a longer URL than that tested, (e.g. insights is actually found at www.google.com/insights/search).

Further details

First of all, let’s ignore some of the tests – nearly 100% of the tested URLs with no www. redirected to the www. version.

This is true both for URLs that exist at the redirected location (e.g. google.com/analytics redirects to www.google.com/analytics) and for the URLs that do not exist,(e.g. google.com/android redirects to www.google.com/android). Therefore, we haven’t considered the non www. versions of the URLs any further.

62% of the products did not have the www.subdomain.google.com version set up.

Perhaps we can let Google off the hook, as many websites with sub-domains setup change to grant the www.subdomain version.

However, it is inconsistent and perhaps careless nonetheless, that half of the of the Google products that do have a subdomain have a www.subdomain version – and half don’t!

Finally, here are the full details for all the tests. (Note that the link checking software that we used unsuccessful to report on all the 302 redirects, it reported all of these as 200 ok – so the position code for the test might be incorrect.)

Some other notable broken URLs include:

Blogsearch
www.google.com/blogsearch/ (with the trailing slash) – weirdly this one redirects to http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch/ which then doesn’t exist.

Feedburner
www.google.com/feedburner – you’d have thought that feedburner was a huge enough product that there must be plenty of people who type in google.com/feedburner

Website Optimiser
websiteoptimizer.google.com is another important Google product with a path study but no sub-domain. First Rate adores this product, it is excellent for improving a client’s website conversion rate.

The Conclusion

Well, really the conclusion is obvious: Google as a “multi-armed hydra” has a variety of different business units and divisions, and perhaps this is the reason that there are no consistent website standards enforced?

And on top of that, Google don’t really need to care – because as a search company, Google knows that if someone fails to find a website they can always do a Google search to find it (and that’s why SEO is so important..!)

Sometimes, the search results for Google’s own products are less than good, e.g. they might lead to an older version of the page which has no obvious link to the newer version, or the phrase used might not match the product study and so the official page is pushed down the search results. Or sometimes even the link might be broken! – But that is a story for another blog post.

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