Tuesday, March 02, 2010 at 4:02 PM
Webmaster Level: AllHow many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.
Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.
The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.
We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you'd like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner's Guide.
108 comments:
Interesting. Thanks for sharing this one!
I liked how much of your recommendations make the content more understandable to the person reading the page discussed.
This makes me feel better about the SEO work I need to do. But I'm disappointed, I was hoping we could run the SEO report card on our sites!
Janet Thaeler
@Newspapergrl
What about SEO card that we can do to audit our own sites?
Yeah, I was definitely looking for a free SEO Report card that I could run on my own sites :-)
I do think it`s great how Google is endorsing SEO like this.... Thanks Google, us SEO`s need a better rep! Glad you could remind the public SEO DOES have value.
Thanks for this. Really interesting to see you analyse your own sites.
I'm really surprised to see that not all your sites are SEO perfect. You are Google after all.
Google doesnt need SEO perfection, Neil. Since it is the site that other sites come to to metric their SEO efforts.
Danke für die Information die sehr Interessant ist.
Hey Googlers,
try this step by step animation on how to optimize Google for Google:
http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html
;-)
tad
Informative,Thanks for sharing post
Very informative look into how Google approach their own SEO, and useful for new SEO's to see what factors need to be considered when carrying out a full SEO audit. Great post!
Very interesting and helpfull for my research.
Thank you Google... Came as a big surprise as i thought Google hates SEO guys :-) I will be taking this as a guideline while i optimize by websites. Thanks again for the very well written report card..
Google SEO findings are very important.
Google is giving us a lot of help. However, I believe Google search results could be of greater healp if they open in a new window, to avoid closing the search result we just openes.
Google Chrome is frequently too slow and there are many sites which can not be seen using Google Chrome.
Jose Damaso Ramon
http://www.josedweblink.com
Hi Jose, you can enable opening search results in a new window/tab on the Search Settings page -- it's called "Results Window: Open search results in a new browser window." I just recently noticed that & use it as well :-).
Also, for general links you can frequently use the middle-click on your mouse to open the resulting page in a new tab using Chrome (and I believe most other browsers too).
Thanks for the share..
I was really looking for something like this so that i can create reports for my sites.
Great resource! Looking for a way to have an SEO report card for for the site we are running
This is just the kind of information I have been looking to add to my website. It is up to date, and straight from Google. Thanks for finally making this available.
I will be reviewing and linking to this on my own website. But I do have one question. Is it possible to allow my readers to upload the file from my website? and if so how would I go about doing that?
For More Free Website Information Click Here
Would love to see a version for international sites/pages as well.
Thanks - we'll def use it to educate our web-developers, because it's written from a pretty tech point of view...
http://needle-syringe.blogspot.com/
I was tickled to death to see that I was doing every single thing on this list correctly with all my sites. The only thing I haven't done was taking the ending slash / into consideration with 301 combining. Guess I will add that.
I have one question. With using the H1 tag, it's almost always too large to really look good on the page. I always use an H2 tag instead. I also felt like re-sizing the H tags with CSS would be forbidden because it is showing one thing to the search engines (h1 is the most important and is large)...yet to the visitor, they see a smaller text. Can you settle that question once and for all? Thanks for a great "report card".
When Google admits to needing improvement in some areas of SEO - makes us human beings feel better :) Thanks for sharing
Really interesting report!
Thanks for sharing! :-)
Super information and confirmation of what some of the better SEO tools have been preaching.
Interesting to see which data points Google considers on it's own. I wonder if this is everything? Ironically, I've been reviewing SEO Audit Reports our clients have received from other SEO consultants before hiring us. This is a nice document that search marketers (internal and consultant) can compare their own evaluations to.
I love how Google's so honest even when they think their product needs improvement they don't try to hide it.
Keep up the great work!
havenly,.... thank you for sharing... i hope this is can help us to improove more about seo mystery....
thanks for this post i will tried this Seo information for my blog Conelbebeacuestas
As someone sends me your post I have looked on your page code and you have made weird choces ?!?
- The page speed optimisation is really poor (hé! We have to reducce CO2 emitions! If I have as trafic as your web site I'll care of each bite...)
- h1 and other title are used as if it was a style effect (good use can help blind you know...)
- no respect for w3c (if we want to have one day html 5 we need a powerfull organisation)
- The code is ugly, no balise desription...
Why did you do all that ?
Is SEO different from Human optimisation?
hey u google idiots. if u dont know where buddha was born dont display it, but dont display it in bloody india or uttar pradesh,, because he was born in lumbini, Nepal. isn't dat ur responsibility for being d most popular site on net. correct it quickly.
I am having trouble downloading this. I am running Adobe 9.3.1. I've tred both Open and Save, but when I open the file, it says the file has been corrupted.
Is there someplace else I can download it?
@Myrtle Beach Web Design,
>>> I also felt like re-sizing
>>> the H tags with CSS would be
>>> forbidden because it is
>>> showing one thing to the
>>> search engines
No, it's not. You can customize H-tags using CSS if you keep the results to something reasonable looking. Of course a heading (h1) should still look more like a heading than a text, but it doesn't necessarily look exactly like browsers would render them without CSS.
If you, or anybody else, has any doubts about this or related topics, including the SEO report card discussed here, post your question(s) in the Webmaster Help Forum:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en
I can really recommend that, as you'd always find conclusive answers from a range of expert users and Googlers there.
-luzie-
Interesting! Thanks for sharing ur SEO report card. Really it will help us lot to understand google search engines behaviour.
Thanks Again!!!
I've been spending a lot of time trying to tweak my site's pages in hopes of placing well within Google, any information, especially information from Google I would consider valuable.
Dade
www.plrinternetmarketing.com
@-luzie,
Thanks. I did that, and for the most part they seemed to agree with you. There's still a few that seem to doubt, but it pretty much made sense. Tnks again.
yuu6
wow..a new seo tutorial
thank you..
regrad's
Travelinous | annosmile
missing trailing slashes are most awdul..
Imho there's no such thing as SEO. It's all about usability and relevancy. That's how I explained it to my boss, and that's how I got hired.
@Suvendug : that's awesome..thanks for sharing this. Hope we will receive more information in near future.
Thanks to google this is helping me a lot.. as we are building a new website...
good and cool
SEO marketing is a joke
time again shown this is manipulative practice
Google hits back over algorithm dispute
By Maija Palmer in London, Richard Waters in San Francisco and Nikki Tait in Brussels
Published: February 25 2010 12:47 | Last updated: February 26 2010 01:20
Google on Thursday mounted a renewed defence of the way it ranks search results, as fresh questions emerged about its practice of sometimes manually intervening to override its automated ranking system.
The company has been forced onto the defensive by the disclosure earlier this week of a preliminary anti-trust review from the European Commission. Brussels is looking into complaints from three companies that Google’s search rankings and its related advertising system treat some competitors unfairly.
Other Google executives have also been at pains this week to stress the impersonal nature of Google’s ranking systems in an attempt to defuse any criticism that results can be manipulated to favour or disadvantage certain sites. Julia Holtz, Google’s European corporate counsel, told journalists in Brussels on Wednesday: “We don’t whitelist or blacklist anyone.”In a blog posting on Thursday, Amit Singhal, a Google employee responsible for the ranking system, claimed that the company’s algorithms produced better quality and more relevant results than one based on human intervention, though he admitted the system was far from perfect.
However, fresh evidence emerged on Thursday that Google employees do sometimes override the system, at least when it comes to the automated process that determines the weighting given to search adverts in its Adwords system.
Google is the greatest search engine all over the world.
http://www.ansarsunna.com
Best regards.
http://www.ansarsunna.com
first of google have to review the original content published from real source before publish on search engines results. I am very depress due to phishing website those are always steal my contents and using unauthorized tools to promote them and my site goes down rank. hummmff... Reported website's are www.icbse.com , www.icbse.org, www.iupsc.com and www.buzz.icbse.org
--
Webmaster
I have to comment that I made note of this same fact before:
http://strongwords.ca/SEO-blog/ever-notice-googles-own-description-in-a-google-serp/
Wealth of information here on a near complete Report Card, already using the majority of contents here. Printed a copy to have at my disposal!
Starting a brand new site back in Sept.09', now 5-6 mos. old on web, now getting a 93 gpa with HubSpot's Web Site Grader. Google getting a 96.5, MySpace getting a 97.5. I see grade point averages vary a little depending on social bookmarks being found from day to day, and how many pages are also seen on a daily basis. Do know however, my http://paintingdenver.net/ site is not too far off from perfection.:)
Right on there Jenny.
I thought it was a interesting enough read although there were no real surprises.
It would indeed be nice to have the option of running this tool over our own sites.
Having said that there is a handful of great tools or softwares out there that do a very impressive job of just that.
It's a bit funny that Google web developers do not have the SEO guidelines already imprinted in their brain. Or they thought that SEO would not matter for Google.
Thanks for sharing such a useful material to all the SEOs. This will be very helful for us.
seo is a very important toole for webmaster.
http://www.ansarsunna.com
Best regards.
http://www.ansarsunna.com
I'll try this stuff
Great Post - I need help solving a problem your report identified on our site. We have the following URL's www.mysite.com/MY/site and this same page may also be linked to with www.mysite.com/my/Site or www.mysite.com/My/Site, etc.
After reading the PDF I understand we need to change this, but how do I figure out which one to redirect all others to? Google SERPs often show lowercase versions, but some pages have Upper case versions? How do I pick the most successful page according to Google? Or does it matter - just pick lowercase and redirect all others?
A great document, have to read it all!!
Really interesting thanks for sharing the information.
www.holytraffic.com
www.forumindia.com
www.forextraining-free.info
Dear Google:
I wanna translate this file into Chinese to share to people who use Chinese, may I?non-profit
my mail : backtrue@gmail.com plz tell me
gautam buddha was born in lumbini,nepal. why does google map go on india if you want to look at the birth place of buddha? need an explanation please!
gautam buddha was born in lumbini,nepal. why does google map go on india if you want to look at the birth place of buddha? need an explanation please!
yes this google seo report card I see and hear first time and I am now going audit my own site. thnx google
Hey, Great post!
In this day and age taking advantage of SEO and social network websites as effective marketing tools for your business is essential! Most businesses dont fully understand the capabilities of these tools to improve traffic and exposure! I was searching for a company to ship one of my vehicle overseas and ran into Auto Shipping Network, I was amazed at how they implemented these tools so well into their company website. Check it out for yourselves at http://www.autoshippingnetwork.com/ .
I read the entire report card. Most of us in the SEO world already know and take into consideration the various issues described in the report card. However, the trailing "/" or virgule is a new one to me. I predominantly use Joomla for my sites. What is interesting is that I have been trying and testing adding or not adding the ".html" at the end of my interior pages. Per this report it is desirable to not have the ".html". Nice.
Another interesting side note for the SEO audience, I found that rebuilding a site from scratch taking into consideration the various tools and descriptions to help our users and of course the Search Engines is often faster than fixing a lousy site. For instance, I am currently building (it's live - but incomplete) a site about Paris Hotels. The client wants to rank for certain Paris Hotel related words and of course the hotel names as well. Don't check it out today but in a few weeks you can see how I used all the issues in the report card to better direct the users and search engines around Paris Accommodation. It's not meant to compete directly with Expedia type sites, just those individuals looking for boutique hotels in Paris.
Currently, I am using ".html" at the end of my internal pages but I will change this - so no "hypocrisy" type comments please!!
Thanks.
-DK
hi..friends I am here for help
my one site on which I am working is in trouble now
its ranking is continuously fluctuating...sometimes it comes into top 10 of Google and some times it gone down up to 500.....what should I do so it comes back to top 10 and become stable...should I stop directory submission for some times??
Please reply...
Question: did you get a sandbox on somme domain?
That's true last summer I changed my html code and title: I get a sandbox and I am still in it!!!!!
Thanks for sharing this! It's comforting to know that even Google doesn't get all the SEO stuff right. And now I'd like to know how you score your own Adwords campaigns... ;-)
Google should take serious actiona against splogs and spam websites.
Some website owners are using my content on their sites without my permission.
These sites are UPSCPORTAL.COM, CBSEPORTAL.COM and PLACEMENTPAPERS.NET.
Please help me what to do now ?
thanks for your suggestions guys...
Thanks for the info!!
I am still learning how SEO's work but I'm getting the bigger picture. I'm an artist and want to optimize my name on the Internet. One site suggested blogging etc. any suggestions?
Debbie Duehring
http://naturehut.ning.com/profile/DeborahDuehringWilley
Thanks a lot for this...
Thanks for sharing very much
http://www.not2.idv.tw
I was amazed how poorly some of Google's own pages optimise for SEO. One would think that SEO knowledge is mainstream with Googlers, but - no, it isn't or they don't care...
I was searching the new idea that found here.
Well , I'd like to learn too , however this is also interesting to see the SEO right in idea of GG.
Great post. The PDF is helpful. Now i can review it for tips on what i should be looking out for when optimizing my own blogs and sites.
Now that is something that's good to see. thanks for posting the report card. I've been having fun with the google dance on long established sites lately as has been most people.
maybe they can learn something from us!
haha, this is actually pretty interesting, thanks Google ;)
i was wondering by the way if things like cpalead crap on sites lowers the seo? there have been a lot of sites that have come out to block cpalead of course so I don't think people will be using cpalead much anyway in the future, but is there a case for not using it because of its impact on seo?
Great share, found it very helpful and interesting, it will help me to improve my blog http://freecomicsmanga.blogspot.com
Thank You Very Much.
Certainly one of the most interesting documents that i have seen from Google. It confirms many aspects of SEO that i wondered about but more importantly, gives me a template to use in comparing my sites against the examples given.
Thank you for the report, very interesting, it taught me what I need to do for my SEO.
I am the webmaster i have some webmaster mail id list these webmaster is 24 hour online then please send request and create a links and please add my id pankajseo2012@gmail.com i have all theme and good page rank.
So is this going to be a tool? If so, when is it getting released? We've worked on a URL review for http://www.SEOAutomatic.com for a long time now... I'm thinking we should stop?
Thank you for sharing this one. Really Appreciate it.
How do you run this tool?
Is there an application to download or website where we enter client URL to get such results.
Paul Freeman
I am wondering on what parameters this Report Card is been generated.Is there a tool to measure our website from Google itself? It won't solve any purpose of my clients website unless I have a tool from Google itself rather then looking for other optimization tools. Also, the content recommended on this card is quite confusing for a fresher.
Believing this tool...is a gambling.
Regards,
Poonam Sud
Parker.iemployee@gmail.com
Good to see Google practice what it preaches :-) This make your views on SEO all the more credible!
HL7 Blogger
One more Suggestion - please either maintain either plural or singular forms
That is really confusing
1.plural form for webmaster tool's'
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
2.Singular form in google sktool
http://www.gogle.com/sktool/
3.and again plural form for Google Insight's'
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
This is the request because many people are tired to see the 404 pages.
you can use 301 redirects between plural and singular forms
putting all the SEO stuff including above with Adword keyword research and its beta in one page will be a very useful and time saving.
Thanks,
Shreyas Borse
SEO, Synergy Tech services
Thank you for the report, very interesting, it taught me what I need to do for my SEO. http://www.maviadres.com
Thanks for sharing...
I like and appreciate to provide such type of SEO guideline and support.
Once again your article is so informative...
This article is really great! Thanks a lot!, It gives a clear insight of optimization we should look for best user and search experience.
thanks for your information
Really this blog has the good info and given the good knowledge. thanks for sharing for information this one.
Great post.. very comprehensive SEO report card..
Dan @ Acuate
The Data Quality Company
I heartly thanks your team for SEO report card.we get more imformation about seo market
It's really funny how Google is apparently the leader in search at the same time, SEOs saying that Google has a failing grade in SEO.
SEOP Inc
LOL, SEO report for Google is pretty funny. I thought they have some kind of filter to always promote their own products in SERPs before anything else.
thanks, this SEO Report card will definitely help me. I would like to report some SPAM sites which are affecting my SERPs, these are upscportal.com, cbseportal.com, mbatown.com and iitportal.com.
There are so many companies out there that specialize in optimizing your site for SEO. My question is - what is considered white hat and what is black hat? There's this popular SEO company that promises 1st page rankings on Google by having contractors (here in the US) build links on forums, blogs, etc. using anchor text links, essentially pretending to be your fans and customers. Is this against any laws? If so, how would Google catch this? It seems to be working well.
Its Really nice to know that Google is improving its workings and established a report card for all to let ideas move around all the memebers which can be very helpful.
kepp it up.
Excellent advise as usual & Thanks for sharing your SEO report card.
Thx for sharing your SEO report card and making us understanding about few seo tips to help us rank our websites in search results.
Could you pls let us know how to create seo report card for our own website? is there any tools?
I really don't know what to say. As an SEO specialist I'm just speechless after the video that I just saw on YouTube, then followed a link to this article and PDF. How can't you follow your own advices. Speechless, really.
I agree with e-coach. An SEO report card for our sites would be a huge help.
Awesome news
This is a great resource for SEO's, thanks for putting this together Google!
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