No, I removed the toolbar a long time back.

Is there a specific reason 'not' to have the toolbar when doing normal seo work, updating or whatever?

Paranoia... and a personal hatred of IE

Or... caution, and a personal preference for Opera ;)

I don't like sharing my online activities with anyone if I can avoid it.

Good to see that you added two additional lines,

Or... caution, and a personal preference for Opera ;)

I don't like sharing my online activities with anyone if I can avoid it.

I will go with caution and I don't like sharing my online activities with anyone if I can avoid it. Very well said.

any other feedbacks?

Let's redefine the question. What can be the possible problems (not what is there but what can be there) of using google toolbar? Once we define it then we will analyze how big is the risk and will let the member decide whether they want to avoid the risk (if at all any) or not.

Thanks,
AjiNIMC

Tedster, what is our FF Google Toolbar? Chopped liver? :o

Good point, Adam. I apologize for overlooking Google's Firefox offering in my zeal to get a jab in at IE. And I suppose I should apologize for taking the cheap shot at Microsoft, too.

As I said, my "browser of preference" is Opera -- got anything cooking?

Is there any known problem with using the Google Toolbar by webmasters? I know it must look like I go to the same page several times when I am working on a new page or revising an older page. Would that be a problem with Google?

I like having the tool bar for research though. I use the 'search this site' function a lot and on long articles I use the highlighter to find the information I'm needing.

Was just trying to get a feedback from the community :).

What toolbar :P

"Search this site", "find occurence of search term" and "Up one level on a site" are godsends to me. Very glad they did a Firefox version.

Good point, Adam. I apologize for overlooking Google's Firefox offering in my zeal to get a jab in at IE. And I suppose I should apologize for taking the cheap shot at Microsoft, too.

As I said, my "browser of preference" is Opera -- got anything cooking?

Tedster, I was definitely joking... no offense taken at all! :)

And lots of folks -- including Googlers -- like and use Opera. I don't have any info on if/when we'll build a toolbar for it, but it surely wouldn't hurt for Operites (Opera-onis? Operaistas?!) to make their interest known via our Toolbar feedback pages.

We try to allocate our internal resources where there's not only the most demand, but also the most opportunity (e.g., to fill in a gap), and eventually I'd expect us to support more and more browsers, platforms, etc.

[edited by: Adam_Lasnik at 12:29 am (utc) on Nov. 6, 2006]

I use FireFox Google Toolbar, Alexa etc.. when doing external sites analysis. So my answer is yes ;-)

I would not think about SEO but the fact that your privacy is not respected when using their toolbar.

I use the toolbar also. Why do you think privacy is not respected? I know that data is send to google when I surf but I don't expect that a bell is ringing at the Google plex when I am online. My surfing behaviour is like that of most of us not that interesting.

As they say, whatever floats your boat.

My boat gets floated by leaving the toolbars off of my computers.

I need nothing going on behind my back or under color of fine print.

It is bad enough that tons of folks insert urchin calls and that a lot of click tracking from serps takes place.

Adam, it is nothing against Google, in general, I resent intrusion.

AjiNIMC, nope.

BTW what are "seo activities"?

I love having the custom search buttons. I think if anyone is so paranoid about what the toolbar sees they are doing something wrong.

My surfing behaviour is like that of most of us not that interesting.

Others (aka. SEs) apparently think differently about this, put out their cookies and toolbars and collect and store whatever they can get.

Thankfully, there are no toolbars for the Lynx browser yet ...

Kind regards,
R.

Can anyone prove the toolbar to cause problems?

I have a great example. We all know that pages browsed with the toolbar installed can get recorded and crawled by Google's bots.

Not a real problem, but I had a case where I was browsing a .cgi script through a "browser view tool" and Google saw that sucker and sent the bot around!

Needless to say when he decided to spider it it caused some horrible problems -- seemd Google got his spider in a loop on the script! My host suspended my account for over cpu usage until we got all the issues worked out.

P.S. Guess I forgot to mention I had not excluded bots from the cgi-bin!

Do I use the google toolbar for SEO activities? Hmm, it really depends on how you define SEO. Most whitehats would have no issue at all with it. I guess people who are doing something against googles guidelines might not use it.

I always use it, but my definition of SEO is:

Clean HTML
Good Content
Good Meta Tags
Good Description Tags
Good Title Tags

and last but not least

Adding good content.

Yes trinorthlighting I agree. Hopefully google can come up with a webdeveloper (firefox) type toolbar which can be more useful. I have no special interest in the green bar.

I was curious to know the overall market feel.

Hey AjiNIMC (and others!),

What kind of stuff would get you to use the Firefox toolbar? I'm happy to point the Google Toolbar folks here to see some specific suggestions :)

Adam if the source was availible I'd consider using it.

Otherwise it (and all other such toolbars) will stay off my computer.

I use <the Firefox Web Developer extension>, it has css validation , image disabled, cookies disabling and the most important refererer disabled. Then you have outlining facility.

For the web developers it is a must these days.

I used google for PR stuffs and that was few years back when I entered this field. Now I no longer use it. People say that google also uses the data for search engine result improvements, I am not sure of it.

[edited by: tedster at 1:20 am (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]

I agree with jbgilbert. I removed the toolbar because it causes googlebot to discover pages or sections of my site that might not be ready for prime time or are merely there for testing purposes.

I discovered this after finding the pages in Google's index and kept wondering how they got there in the first place. As soon as I figured it out, bye bye toolbar.

Yes of course you use the toolbar its rule no:1

I agree with jbgilbert. I removed the toolbar because it causes googlebot to discover pages or sections of my site that might not be ready for prime time or are merely there for testing purposes.

Can this happen? There may be some other reasons like a accidental link from some other page.

I think googlebot and toolbar are not related. Toolbar can be used for user experience analysis.

IMO google toolbar is like browser google analytics for collecting sample for various site user experience.

For all the world to see on Nov 7, 2006 at 3:29 am AjiNIMC asks,

"Can this happen? There may be some other reasons like a accidental link from some other page."

Yes after all you just told Google about the page by using the toolbar, and the other is also a possiblity, however you should give some measure of reliability to the folks saying it happens because of just the toolbar.

The only thing that hasn't been mentioned is that puting any adsense code in a page also gets the attention of the Googlebot.

Do you use google toolbar with seo activities?

I remember of such incidents been reported in the past as well.

Hey AjiNIMC (and others!), What kind of stuff would get you to use the Firefox toolbar?

Adam, I'd like to see the supplement pages also included in the page info section. I just installed toolbar to check the new features. I will have to explore more.

[edited by: tedster at 3:09 am (utc) on Nov. 8, 2006]