Well, I wouldn’t call it going to war. Our guidelines have said the same thing they’ve been saying for 5, 6, 7 years, which is essentially ‘Please don’t hit us with automated queries’. The reason we’ve said that is that people do it us with automated queries and that takes up some server capacity.
So when someone is scraping Google and if we know that person, we might write to them and politely ask ‘Hey, please stop scraping. It does violate our guidelines, it does take server capacity. We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t scrape us’.
We do have automated system to protect ourselves against denial-of-service attacks, scrapers, there are some viruses, Trojans and malware that try to spread themselves by doing searches on Google for vulnerable software. We try to find those things and block them.
If something is taking up a sizeable amount of our server resources, we do have automated systems that attempt to stop that.
That said, we do have tools – for example, in Webmaster Tools console (google.com/webmasters) we can sign up and you can see the sorts of words you’re ranking for and sorts of words that people click through onto your site for.
We have a philosophy that it doesn’t do you as much good to pay a ton of attention to ranking reports. It’s much better to look at your server logs to see what are the queries people are really showing up for. Maybe try to find queries that you rank at #5 or #4 that you could rank at #1, #2 or #3, or queries that you rank for on second page where you could maybe move on the first page. And you can also look at those queries and try to improve your ROI.
So, if 1% of the people who land on your site convert to people who subscribe to your newsletter or buy your products, if you could 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.
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 – thinking about those sort of terms rather than being obsessed with rankings.
That said, I would support if we had more ability for people to see these sorts of things that they rank for in Google’s Webmaster console. It’s just a question of resources. Is it better to support something like canonical link tag which takes an engineer working on it, or ranking reports?
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 Google bot fetches your page’ and not concentrate or obsess so much about ranking reports.
That’s a rough little bit of background about how we feel about it.
Related posts:
- We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?
- Whenever Google detects a violation of its Webmaster Guidelines, can we expect a feature to be added in Google Webmaster Central where it could help the webmasters learn what the issue was?
- Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites? It does happen for many branded products
- How accurate is Google’s backlink check (link:…)? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more backlink results?
- Is Google planning to create read-only “Guest Accounts” for Webmaster Tools? Many clients (particularly in heavily regulated industries e.g. banks) are very reluctant to provide access to a third party.
