Matt Cutts recently posted a video on YouTube in response to a question from Mark Lykle:
“When will Google create a software similar to Web Position so 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”
First of all, Matt clarifies that they aren’t going to war with these programs – they’ve been suggesting for years that they don’t want to be hit with lots of automated queries, as this uses up server resources that they would rather use elsewhere. Google will sometimes request that people that make repeated automated queries stop doing this, so that they can use their server capacity for the things that they intended them for.
Often, if there appears to be something heavily automated is hitting the Google servers, there are automatic processes involved on the servers that prevent that IP being able to use Google search – I’ve experienced this a few times when writing reports for clients and manually checking the rankings of their highest traffic driving keywords – which is frustrating, although somewhat understandable given their guidelines.
Matt goes on to mention tools that they have in Webmaster Tools that provide information about top search queries, but this information isn’t incredibly useful all the time.
Google’s philosophy is that it isn’t all that sensible to get hung up on ranking reports with search engine optimisation and that they think its more sensible to look at the server logs, to see what types of keywords are driving traffic to the site.
However, here is the conundrum – Matt suggests looking at which of the phrases driving traffic to the site aren’t in top positions in terms of rankings and working on them to drive increased traffic levels to the site.
So, my question is – how do you do that without checking rankings?
Yes, looking at the server logs and seeing the traffic driven to websites is vastly more important that fixating on rankings without even looking at what is bringing visitors to the website.
But how can you know what to improve without being able to check where you are ranking for those phrases?
I think that rank checking still plays an important role in the SEO world – there are plenty of other equally important factors to review as well, but rank checking isn’t going to be going away anytime soon.
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