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Will Google provide a rank-checking service?

 
 

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Abstract Abstract

Questions: “When will Google create a ranking software so that people can check their rankings without violating the quality guidelines?”

Answer: Such software would use an increased amount of server capacities, which is also the reason why the quality guidelines forbid scraping Google. While there might be support for such an endeavor, Google has historically opted for developing never features that are helpful for the majority of users.
0:00
Mark Lykle from Oslo, Norway asks „When will Google create a software similar to WebPosition such that SEOs, spam fighters and regular webmasters can check rankings etc without violating the guidelines? Why not make a better product instead of going to war against these programs?“

0:18
Well I wouldn't call it going to war. I mean our guidelines have said the same thing that they've said for 5, 6, 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.

1:01
So if something is taking up 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 console; so at google.com/webmasters where you can sign up and you can see the sorts of words that you are ranking for and the sorts of words that people sort of click through onto your site for and I think we have a philosophy that it doesn't do you as much good to pay really a ton of attention to ranking reports.

1:30
It's much better to look at your server logs to see what are the queries people are really showing up for and maybe, you know, try to find queries that you rank at number five or number four that you could rank at number 2 or 3 or 1 or queries where you rank on the second page, where you could maybe move to the first page and then you can also look at those queries and try to improve your ROI.

1:49
So if 1% of the people who land on your site convert into people who subscribe to your newsletter 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.

2:04
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 then getting obsessed with ranking.

2:19
That said, I would support, you know, if we had more ability for people to see the sorts of things that they rank for in Google's webmaster console, it's just a question of resources. You know, is it better to support something like the canonical link tag which takes an engineer working on it? Or ranking reports?

2:35
And at least historically, we've said “Ok, let's have these newer features. Let's show you all of your backlinks, let's show you what your latency looks like when Googlebot fetches your page” and not concentrate or obsess so much about ranking reports.

2:47
So that's a rough little background about how we feel about it.