Comment Re:Makes Sense (Score 1) 225
Jesus Christ, did you read what you just wrote?
Why, yes, yes, I did.
Google Search exists to help people find what they're looking for,
There's your problem, right there. Google exists to make money. They do this by doing a good enough job to make most people use them first for search. If you think that google exists to make your job as a website administrator easier, then you've got a huge sense of misplaced entitlement.
and you're saying it's our job to tell Google how to help people find our site?
There seems to be a bit of projection going on here -- you're getting on my case for not reading what I wrote, then turning around and claiming I wrote things that I didn't.
But even though I never wrote that, if it's your job to help your customers find your site, and a lot of your customers are miffed (and complaining, and defecting and/or wasting your time) because they can't find you through google, then (assuming 2+2 still equals 4) yes, of course, it behooves you to spend a bit of time to understand google's crawler well enough to make sure that google dumps your customers on the page you'd like to see them on.
For example, if it were my site, the very first thing I would do is check to make sure that I didn't have a misconfigured robots.txt anywhere in the search path. Then I would figure out what, if anything, google is actually serving from that site (using the site: option in the search), and then I would google (yes, the devil!) for SEO techniques for my exact situation. Finally, if I figured out that google really did have difficulty reconciling two different email web pages for the same domain, then I would probably chalk it up to competence, rather than incompetence -- on a web host, figuring out the primary webmail portal and always directing to that could probably cut down on a lot of phishing attacks -- and then either unify the webmail portals, or put a link from one to the other, or separate the domains, or anything else that was required to prove to google that my second webportal wasn't just a phishing site.
But since you're entitled to google doing all your shit for you even though you're not paying them to babysit your customers, you probably can't be bothered to do any of that stuff.
If people want to find our web mail portal they can come to the website we print on their damn bill, or they can call and ask us how to get to it.
That's a perfectly lovely attitude, and I wish you and your company all the success in life you both deserve.