Google Custom Search Engine: Good Idea?
-
I created a Google Custom Search Engine for our site, but I"m not sure implementing it is a good idea. When I tested it with the public URL, I noticed that ads show up on the search engine that could potentially move visitors away from our site to our competitors.
Has anyone had success with implementing a Google Custom Search Engine? Do the pros outweigh the cons?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Ruben,
In my experience, it's a decent low-budget site search tool. However, it does have a few hangups. As you mentioned, it shows ads unless you pay for a higher tier of subscription. Also, the aesthetics of it are also somewhat limited. It's difficult to make it look good within the frame of the rest of your site.
And last, but most importantly, Google custom site search is exactly the same set of pages that are indexed for regular Google searches. While this isn't a problem for most, there are instances (for larger sites specifically) where you'd want to noindex or disallow certain types of content to not show in the SERPs, but you would want that content to be accessible via internal search. Think of a University site for example: TONS of URLs on a college's website, whether it's events or course catalogs, a lot of this doesn't need to be shown in SERPs. If you're using Google custom search, these same sets of pages will also be inaccessible there.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How long does google takes to crawl a single site ?
lately i have been thinking , when a crawler visits an already visited site or indexed site, whats the duration of its scanning?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
Site appearing and disappearing from google serps.
Hi, My website is normally on page 2-3 on google consistently. Over the past month it has been appearing and then completely disappearing from the serps. One day it will be on page 2, then the next day completely missing from the serps. When i check the index it seems to be indexed correctly when doing site:mysite.com. I don't understand why this keeps happening, any experience with this issue? It doesn't seem to be a google dance as far as I can tell. When my other sites dance they typically just go up or down a few ranks for a couple weeks until they stabilize. Not completely fall off the search engine.
Algorithm Updates | | Chris_www0 -
How Google distinguish and ignore keyword attested with or in a brand?
Hi community, Generally there will be a primary keyword which everybody concentrates and expect their homepage or website to rank for....like "seo" for seo consulting or seo tools. There might be some companies with this keyword in their brand name like "ABC SEO". So this primary keyword will be all over the website being part of the brand name; especially in page titles and header tags. How Google distinguish and ignores this keyword in brand name to avoid giving more ranking boost to such websites? Will this keyword will be completely ignored being the part of the company name or their domain name? How Google distinguish between a generic keyword and keyword in company name? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Will increased pagerank increase traffic from google?
I got notified that my domain went from a google pagerank of 3 to 4. When this happens, does google raise me in the searches which can then hopefully get me more traffic, or is it a worthless number. Maybe only google knows 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BrickPicker0 -
Drop in Traffic from Google, However no change in the rankings
I have seen a 20% drop in traffic from google last week (After April 29th). However when I try to analyze the rank of the keywords in the google results that send me traffic they seem to be the same. Today (6th March) Traffic has fallen further again with not much/any visible change in the rankings. Any ideas on what the reason for this could be? I have not made any changes to the website recently.
Algorithm Updates | | raghavkapur0 -
Decent rankings in Google, nothing in Bing and Yahoo
Hi there, I'm in the process of SEOing a site in a very competitive sector, the short term loans market. The URL for the site is http://www.piggy-bank.co.uk. I've managed to get a fair bit of success in Google for some very competitive keywords like short term loans, short term lender etc but in Bing and Yahoo I'm having no luck at all, with only 2 visits in the past month and no decent rankings!! I think I'm doing everything right, with regular new content on the site, decent technical SEO, semantic site structure, regular site map upload, a 10 year old domain, holistic link building through guest blogging etc, but still no luck at all. Looking at the webmaster tools in Bing, 95% of the URLs are indexed, but I'm getting such a low impression count, and obviously, an even lower click through. Am I missing something really obvious? Does anyone have any suggestions to improve my Bing and Yahoo rankings? I've worked on 100s of other sites and Yahoo and Bing tend to be the easy win to make the client happy 😉 Thanks in advance for your help. Dan
Algorithm Updates | | djslimited1 -
Has there been a Google change in the last 24 hours?
We have come in this morning to find our site (paydayuk.co.uk) has suddenly disappeared from their SERPs, we have consistently been ranking in the top 5 for a wide range of search terms but now do not even appear for our brand name of Payday UK where we have been first for many months. Our site is still indexed and we have made no changes for a while as any SEO work is waiting on completion of a CMS system. Looking in https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking and there seem to be a lot of people having the same issues but as of yet no answers. I'd also like to add we don’t use black hat techniques so we really don’t understand why we have been penalised. Can anyone help please?
Algorithm Updates | | Sarbs0 -
Google Cached Pages
I made some on-site changes to a site last week, in particular their page titles. This was all done on the same day at the same time. Now, one of those pages, got re-indexed on August 8th and has my updated changes, which also helped with my ranking. The other page I made changes to still shows a cached version from July 27th, which is before I made the changes. Why wouldn't google have an updated page from August 8th for both pages, not just one?
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelWeisbaum0