Will Google provide a rank-checking service?

Mark Lykle, from Oslo, Norway asks “When will Google create a software similar to Web Position so that SEOs, spam fighters and regular webmaster can check rankings etc. without violating the guidelines? Why not make a better product instead of going to war against these programs?”

Well, I wouldn’t call it going to war; I mean our guidelines have said the same things that they have said for 5, 6 or 7 years, which is essentially please don’t hit us with automated queries. And the reason that we’ve said that is because people do hit us with automated queries and that takes up some server capacity. So if someone is scrapping Google if we know that person then we may write to them and say, hey please stop scrapping, it does violate our guidelines, it does takes server capacity, we’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t scrap us. And then we do have automated system to protect ourselves against denial service attacks, scrappers, there are some viruses, Trojans and malware that try to spread themselves, by doing searches on Google on vulnerable software and so we try to find those things and block it. So if something is taking a sizable amount of our server resources we do have automated systems that attempt to stop that. That said we do have tools for example in the webmaster tools council at google.com/webmasters we can sign in and you can see the sorts of words that you are ranking for and the sorts of words that people click through on through your site for. I think we have a philosophy that it doesn’t do you as good as to pay really a ton of attention to ranking reports. It’s much better to look at your server logs to look at what are the queries that people are really showing up for and may be try to find queries that you rank at number 5 or number 4 that you can rank at number 2 or number 3 or 1 or queries that you rank on the second page that can be moved to the first page. You can also look at those queries and try to improve your ROIs, so if one percent of the people who land on your site convert into people who subscribe you newsletters or buy your products. If you can improve that so that more people convert, that’s a much faster way to improve your bottom line than just trying to rank for everything when it isn’t necessarily relevant. So I think it’s a little bit of philosophy that we don’t want to encourage people to get obsessed with their rankings when in fact they should be paying attention to what they already have in their server logs and thinking about how to convert better and thinking about those sorts of terms rather than getting obsessed with rankings. That said I would support if we had more ability for people to see the sorts of things that they rank for in Google’s Webmaster Council, it’s just a question of resources, is it better to support something like a canonical link tag, which takes the engineer working on it or ranking reports. At least historically we have said lets have all these newer features let’s show all of your back links lets show you what does your latency looks like when Google boff fetches your page and not concentrate or obsess about ranking reports. That’s the little bit of background how we feel about it.

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