Google Page Creator Update

A while back I made some posts about Google’s page creator (beta).

In my mind these are a bid to help Google create massive amounts of unique, non-duplicated information for their search customers.

At this point, evidently anyone with a Gmail account can sign up and make their own pages.

Each website can host 100 MB for free and NO ugly banners, text ads, pop ups or other junk that you’ll find on other “free web hosting sites”.

The online page creator is easy to use and is targeted to people with no web publishing background.

It is possible to edit html in the page creator, but as you’ll see below, that may not mean as much as you’d hoped!

I made a site just to play around…. it’s http://informationguy.googlepages.com/ and you’ll find a home page and one additional page.

My thinking in playing around with this is that perhaps these sites are “pre-optimized” like blogger sites and will be easily picked up by the search engines.

The pages are generated using style sheets that Google controls, though there’s a good amount of page layout flexibility using predesigned forms you can select from.

No FTP capacity, so google pages will be blessedly free from computer generated sites that scrape and paste from all over the net but yield precious little real information.

In my experimenting though some drawbacks to the system are immediately apparent.

These sites will not host java scripts.

I found this out when I tried to put a stat counter on … no success.

These sites do not even host google’s own adsense script – though perhaps they will at some point.

You’ll note from my test site that you CAN host Adsense “seach”… that’s because it’s a form… not the ordinary java script.

This also means you could have other forms on your site such as an autoresponder lead capture, I just haven’t tried that yet.

There are other things I might have tried, but I just ran out of time.

I’d like to hear your experience though if you’re trying to use these free pages for business purposes.

All in all, for non commercial users who just want to post information online, this is all many of them would need as long as they don’t mind a subdomain of googlepages.

Hopefully though, Google will allow people to buy domains for their google pages at a reasonable price and host adsense ads.