As you know, Google is making efforts to update their GoogleBot to crawl the more modern web. We reported it about it last week. But that bothered at least one SEO who complained that they worked on all these workarounds and now Google is going to ditch those workaround when this new GoogleBot goes live.
In response to that, Google’s Martin Splitt seemed to be bothered and went off a bit. I don’t blame him, most companies that build software (including mine) will make upgrades, users may be upset but ultimately it is for the best.
Martin responded on Twitter saying “So what would you like us to do? Not update Googlebot? Update it without testing and possibly breaking millions of sites?”
So what would you like us to do?
Not update Googlebot?
Update it without testing and possibly breaking millions of sites?I’m curious…
— Martin Splitt @🇨🇭🏡 (@g33konaut) April 13, 2019
I’ve seen this type of response from Google before. I believe with the sunsetting of the AJAX crawling scheme and many other upgrades Google has made that made some workarounds kind of useless. Of course, this webmaster might be upset about the rel next/prev non change but who knows.
In this case, Google is 100% right – they should work to make it so that webmasters, developers and SEOs do not have to use workarounds for Google to crawl, index and rank their pages. Google should not sit on their hands and wait.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
