Webmaster console features?
What do you want to see the Webmaster Central team do next? About 10 months ago, Google Blogoscoped asked what people wanted next. It’s time to ask that question again, because the team has made great progress. From the original thread:
- See the backlinks for my site: DONE. Site owners can now see their own backlinks.
- Verify an IP address is really Googlebot: DONE, not in the webmaster tool, but by using a reverse+forward DNS lookup.
- An option to easily remove URLs from the index: DONE. Google’s URL removal tool has been ported into the webmaster console, and it allows site owners to see and revoke their self-removals.
- Show how many people are subscribed to my website’s feeds in Google Reader: DONE, but not in the console. Google Reader now reports these numbers when fetching feeds. Feedburner will give you even more stats for free.
- Communicate with webmasters in an authenticated way: DONE. Just last week, Google added a webmaster message center to provide authenticated communication with site owners. The Webmaster Central team has done of ton of other stuff in the last few months as well.
So let’s ask the question again. I’m going to try doing a poll (it might not work with Google Reader, so you might have to visit my actual blog page). I sat down and thought of a few features that might be cool, then added some suggestions from the original Blogoscoped thread. Vote for your favorite feature below, or leave a comment if you have a different idea. Please note: I’m sure the Webmaster Central team will be interested to see what people like, but remember that these are just suggestions. Even if something is #1 in the poll, it’s still only a suggestion. The Webmaster Central team has to be free to pursue whatever they think is the most important.
What should the webmaster central team do next?
- Webmaster console adds message center
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Craig Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:23 am
Umm, why no option, “ALL OF THEM!!!!” :-()
Although I voted for “Diagnostic wizard for common site problems”, I think “More information about penalties or other scoring issues” runs a very close second if for no other reason than to prove/disprove a penalty actually exists.
And, were the “information about penalties” to include the actual reason for the specific penalty and specific page(s) it is being applied for, it would then seem to be a toss-up, for me, as to which were more useful.
I base this not on what I myself would necessarily find all that useful but more so, what I see most questions come up for at the Google Webmaster Tools help forum.
I still think there should have been an “ALL OF THEM!!!” option.
Craig
Harith Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:32 am
Hey Matt,
We don’t want Mrs. Cutts to wake up and smell the coffee, do we?
Per-Erik Skramstad Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:32 am
I really miss one thing: When I go through the external backlinks in the Webmaster’s Tools, I miss an option, like a check box, to “ignore all pages from this site”. When you go through hundreds of links, it is pretty annoying to have to see links from your other sites.
SearcHEnGineSWeB Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:36 am
♦ One feature that would be extremely helpful (but VERY resource intensive) would be to have an ARCHIVE of rankings for keywords suggested by the users …
♦ Also it would be helpful to filter and display the most common keywords and keyphrases in anchor backlinks of a site …
♦ Also, if a site is being scrutinized by the Google Webspam team - it is vital that web site owners get to address DIRECTLY - their concerns and confront the Google Webspam team about the standards that are being used …
You are insular and do NOT have the benefit of the other side’s viewpionts and arguments, and there is a tendency to overgeneralize and simplify things into Good or Bad.
Of course, one can post in forums and blogs - but no Website owner really knows what is being said or discussed behind one’s back - those who dare to MUST be able to confront..
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/101921.html
Matt Cutts Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:40 am
Going to bed now, Harith.
Thanks for the reminder.
rencontre Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:46 am
I would go for language and country specification. We have seen many French results and sites ending up in Swedish Google.se for specific terms. The same issue applies to TLD .co.uk and webmasters need french audience to read their sites because it has a French content.
But I think this will remain a problem since it is hard to define the searchers needs when he use a generic keyword, would you Google answer him with English pages or local version of this generic term in his specific ip lookup serps?
elias Kai Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:46 am
Good night and I do agree with these issues.
Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
Andrew Heenan Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:02 am
Howzabout webmaster tools giving us a “Google Site Map Creator”?
Some of us technofobes can’t even understand the instryuctions for DIY, let alone do it, and the list of ‘third party’ sitemap generators includes some that are often not available (or swamped), some that add questionnable extra stuff to your site, and some that produce wildly varying quality.
I created one for a site and it listed fewer than a third of the pages. A second attempt with the same tool included all - but the code was broken. A third attempt got three quarters, so I put up with that at the time.
It’s your sitemap protocol; surely a reliable in-house tool would be a logical and sensible move?
Tom Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:04 am
Great post Matt - and these are some very cool tools to pull into webmaster central, if I could vote for all of them I would!
The ones I’d most like to see however are:
Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
Tell Google a parameter doesn’t matter
A way to list supplemental result pages
Pretty please
Maurice Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:12 am
As we have anumber of peopel who host .coms (or other non geographic domains) in germany away of saying actulay this site is for the english market would be an absolute godsend.
benoit VINCENEUX Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:15 am
please add all of them
Shawn K. Hall Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:15 am
“Show causes of 404 errors” is about as close as I can get to what I really want, which is to have an option to have Googlebot send a referrer header. Or at least present a referrer in the data in webmaster tools when the status code is anything other than 200.
Bryce Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:20 am
I wish I could have voted for more than one
William Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:30 am
Matt, could we get all these features under one roof?
It may be easy for you to remember which pages/URLs all these different features live at in/out of Google, but it’s hard for me (and others?).
Thanks
Andy Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:44 am
I went for the ’show my broken links’ option as I’ve lost count how many times the console has told me there’s one somewhere on the site, and I’ve then had to spend forever hunting around to find the blasted thing. Seems an easy fix to me - if the console can tell us where they’re pointing to, it can’t be too big a job to also tell us where they’re pointing *from*?
Lots of other good stuff on the list, but one I DON’T want to see implemented is page rank numbers instead of low/medium/high - why feed the obsession? This is one case where a general indication is more use than a specific, IMHO.
wingthom Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:48 am
Thanks Matt for asking + putting it into a survey which is much easier to scan than a very long thread.
One hint for future questionaires: it would be very nice (and easy to compute as well) to have 100 points that you can vote for more than 1 item. Now you have to give 100 % to one item, would be better to split this vote to several items. Maybe this makes sense.
Ian Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:52 am
These are the more important/nice ones:
# Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
# Show links on your site that are broken
# More information about penalties or other scoring issues
# Show pages that don’t validate
# Tell Google a parameter doesn’t matter
# A way to list supplemental result pages
Also, can I state, “Option to “disavow” backlinks from or to a site” - whaa? That sounds like you’re getting rather too close for comfort to Google telling people that sites linking to you can mess up your rankings
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:02 am
You simply MUST give more information about penalties in particular the 950 penalty. Why you continuously avoid the question is troubling to say the least.
Daniel Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:05 am
With my four websites that depend on Google traffic all being penalized and without google traffic, for three months with no one except Google knowing why, it is not hard to choose.
# More information about penalties or other scoring issues
It is extremely frustrating to have your websites gutted by Google without knowing why.
Peden202 Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:15 am
How about the improvement of spam removal?
I have reported a website that uses black hat techniques including the spamming of google local results many, many, many times. Yet the site is still being listed on Google and is still receiving visitors by deceptive means.
This has lead me to believe that Google is just putting on a front, claiming to fight spam and occasionally taking high profile action (BMW) to keep up the facades of spam fighters. I would love to hear your response to this.
joshnunn Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:17 am
I wasn’t sure whether it was really covered by the options:
I’d like to know where my 404 errors are coming from - who’s generated them I mean. I’ve tried searching to track down why some pages are in Google’s index that don’t exist to decide if its worth redirecting them somewhere, but there isn’t an easy way to find that information. Then failing that - a way to say “ignore this link” - especially for links that I can’t redirect as they never existed.
Nick Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:28 am
First time commenter so be easy on me!
How about a reason why a certain page is in the supplementary index
eg no links / lack of content/ spam
Mark Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:32 am
Faster updates of the data would be great. It takes between 2 days and 2 weeks for some of the information to work its way through the tool - especially the crawl rate section.
david Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:41 am
I like the console a lot, and all of your suggestions sound great, but here’s what I’d like the most: the ability to type in a search phrase dynamically and have the console tell me how high my site in general or a specific page ranks in the results for that phrase at that moment. You could cut it off at 100 or so, to keep from thrashing the database.
Mark Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:44 am
More information about penalities for me would be the most welcome. The reason, most site owners try their best to create sites that are clean and within google guideline. The ones that do not know who they are, however, often times people see strange results without a good reason. If people knew more about why; this would not only help the site owner with good intentions, but also google.com becasue people could give more informed feedback about the search results.
Klaus Johannes Rusch Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:56 am
All of them of course
I was torn between “Tell Google the correct country or language for a site” and “More information about penalties or other scoring issues”.
Depending on the definition of site, the ability to tell Google the correct country or language could be a huge improvement, both for site owners and users running local searches. Ideally, this would be on a page level and would allow for multiple countries, for example a German shop might serve customers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Limiting local searches to the country domain excludes some valid results.
More, or rather more precise, information about why Google doesn’t like a site would be helpful too (see my rant at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/comments-on-our-webmaster-guidelines/#comment-107773 also).
Theo Plooy Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 4:13 am
Can the displayed backlinks and pagerank be more recent?
Deb Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 4:43 am
Hi Matt
This is a wonderful post and I voted but I wish to vote more that I want
Thanks
Deb
Shahid Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 4:46 am
Hi Matt,
As I could only vote for one, I have included my list below:
I would love to see the following,
* Tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content
* Show links on your site that are broken
* Option to “disavow” backlinks from or to a site
Thanks
Philipp Lenssen Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 4:54 am
(Wouldn’t it make sense to shuffle the poll items, so there won’t be a skew in some way connected to the fixed list order?)
> Option to “disavow” backlinks from or to a site
Interesting. So that’s in case someone tries googlebowling you? Well, I still hope for Google to do this defense automatically, I don’t want to spend too much time configuring all these things (especially because there’s several search engines out there, so it’s better to have only a single open configuration for all of them — e.g. robots.txt, Sitemaps).
From the list, I really like “Show pages that don’t validate”, but as we can only select one, I’m going for “Ability to show/download all pages from a site”. This sounds really interesting.
Harry Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 5:11 am
When viewing backlinks, it would be great to have them grouped by domain first and then be able to break this down to see specific pages that are linking.
For example:
http://www.domain1.com (10 links)
http://www.domain2.com (7 links)
Then clicking the “www.domain1.com” would give me:
http://www.domain1.com/page1 (last accessed xxx) (page rank: x)
http://www.domain1.com/page2 (last accessed xxx) (page rank: x)
http://www.domain1.com/page3 (last accessed xxx) (page rank: x)
http://www.domain1.com/page4 (last accessed xxx) (page rank: x)
All the other suggestions you mention are great. Please implement them all!
Harry
Craig Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 5:33 am
One thing I would like to add, if any of the options mentioned are considered, it would be nice if those which aren’t available any other way would be higher priority.
One’s I think are of as possibly being lesser priority and why are :
“Show causes of 404 errors” and “Show links on your site that are broken” - the webmaster can just use a site link checker, e.g. Xenu, instead. If it is not a broken link from your site, who cares. If it is a backlink, checking one’s backlinks would tell one what one needed to know.
“Tool to help move from one domain to a new domain” - Since server side actions are needed to do it right anyway, about the best Google could do would be to provide a tool to tell the bots to wait because a transition is taking place. Google can’t change htaccess files or IIS configurations or all the backlinks from other sites and can’t change people bookmarks so why provide a tool that would more than likely get used wrongly in the first place.
“Ability to show/download all pages from a site (e.g. if your server crashed)” - Unless Google has ALL pages somewhere, even if not in the Main or Supplemental index, this is of dubious value anyway. Other than that, anyone who doesn’t have backups deserves what they get or don’t get as the case may be.
“Show pages that don’t validate” - D’Oh! Firefox plugin HTML Tidy or better yet, the W3C online validation. If Google ranked based on validation, MAYBE it would be useful but the day Google does that is the day the Internet goes dark. :-()
“A way to list supplemental result pages” - That’s easy, all the pages that aren’t in the Main index are either Supplemental or no-mental.
“Integrate “Add URL” feature” - Or better yet, get rid of it altogether.
“Fetch a page as Googlebot to verify correct behavior” - This is actually the opposite of others I have listed in this comment. This would be HUGELY useful in the Webmaster Tools help forum. After the number of arguments about a tag not being closed “here” properly for X/HTML or an improperly nested tag “there” making the page un-seeable to Google, and even considering a number of experiments proving the opposite, having a tool like this would save a LOT of time!
Craig
g1smd Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 5:35 am
There are HTML tags that you can already use to state the language and country for a page. I would prefer to use those on a per-page basis knowing they will be read and actioned by Google, rather than having to log-in somewhere at multiple search engines and then re-state what I have already stated on the site itself.
Something I would like to see, I discussed with both you and Adam separately at SES some time ago. For my validated email address in WMT, I would like to see a list of all of the sites that have included my email address as a mailto: link, so that I can contact all those sites and get them to protect the email address from being spidered by spammers. A normal Google search will already show me sites that have my email address as anchor text, but not those where it is only inside a mailto link.
HawkEye Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 5:43 am
# Score the crawlability or accessibility of pages
For a good number of webmasters, who wouldn’t be aware of the importance of a goog internal linking, this would be nice.
# More information about penalties or other scoring issues
Even if it opens the door to a bit of reverse engineering, which may affect quality of results with time, learning more about the penalties and filtering effects would be a goog thing in my opinion.
But definitely, what would be very nice would be to have fresher data than the actual refresh rate grants us. Having links updated on a monthly basis is not quick enough… Let’s have it weekly, please
Anyway, thanks for asking us!
Denis
Tobias Schwarz Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 5:52 am
Asking webmasters about new features is really a good thing but there are still several things that could and should be improved first:
1. I miss a validator for Sitemaps; I have a sitemapindex file that always shows up with errors and I can’t figure out why.
2. I miss a way to submit bugs; When I logout I’m always redirected to https://www.google.com:80/webmasters/tools - and that target does not exist.
Chris Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:02 am
I voted for “Score the crawlability or accessibility of pages”, would would like to equally back the following, as I think they are all important:
* Tool to help move from one domain to a new domain
* Diagnostic wizard for common site problems
* Show pages that don’t validate
* Show pages that don’t validate
I’d also like to see the new message center thing offered as a web feed, so that I don’t have to log-in to check messages, but rather see it pop up under my feed reader, which I am more than likely to see much sooner, even if it’s just a simple “Google have a message for you, log in to see it”. Something that doesn’t require authentication would be great.
I’d also like to be able to tell Google about planned downtime, so that if on the slim chance Google comes a’crawling when I’m moving to a new host / server, etc, it’ll know to perhaps try in 2 days, rather than be met with a host of 404’s or a site that’s full of PHP errors.
Oh, there’s an idea, if when crawling Google comes across one of those ugly PHP errors, it could be reported in the message center.
On final one, which is perhaps a large task, but I remember a while ago I think PHPBB was targeted because it listed it’s version number at the bottom of each page, and had known file names, and bots could just scan sites for such things, and only attack the ones that listed an out-dated and known insecure version. Perhaps Google could add some sort of basic notification for popular scripts / services, such as this and alert the site owner in the message center? For example, if the above were to occur, and Google scanned the text “This site is powered by PHPBB 1.2.3.4″, and Google knew that this was a version that could be hacked because of a known vulnerability, a message could appear to alert the site owner. While this of course is impossible for all services available, perhaps the well known and widely used ones could be included?
Okinawa Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:14 am
I’d like a command like the “site:” command that used to tell you how many pages of your site Google had indexed.
Arjen Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:15 am
Its funny to see how different sites will result in different requirements, I think the size of it and type of users and traffic really change things for you.
Frankly, I don’t care about the more basic stuff, it would take hours or days to download all our pages (and days or weeks to regenerate the databases from them…) from a backup, and I’d be highly surprised if we got penalyzed by Google. So I don’t need those things, although I can understand why they’d be added.
But in contrast to Craig:
Since we have a big site with close to forty thousand articles written by paid authors and a forum with almost 20 million comments, I would really like to know which of our articles link to (now) non-existent content or (now) questionable sites and which user comments link to questionable content.
For instance, many sites we linked to years ago have disappeared and their domains are taken by link farms or are just gone now.
Using a url-checker isn’t really feasible with a site of our size. But google already crawls our and other sites… so knowing where 404’s are coming from, knowing which pages don’t validate and finding broken links on our site would be really useful for us.
Drew Stauffer Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:21 am
Where’s the “all of them” option?
All of the options would be helpful on some level or another.
sem4u Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:21 am
I voted for “Tell Google the correct country or language for a site”. This would be especially useful for those of us working on English sites for use in different countries such as USA, UK, Canda, Australia, etc.
I agree with g1smd that using existing HTML tags would probably be a better option.
conseoquences Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:26 am
Would be nice to be able to send in spam reports and get some information on the status of report.
Grant Barrett Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:49 am
These are my special little hobby horses:
A tool for reporting our *own* paid links. And a way of notifying us if we are being penalized for using them. Lots to discuss on this, but my little dictionary site couldn’t stay online without revenue from Text Link Ads, which return about double what Google Ads do everything month. But if I found that I was definitely being punished for them, then I’d desperately look around for something else. The paid links are clearly marked as “sponsored” but I have no way of adding “no follow” to the Text Link Ad code.
Under “tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content,” we need a way to grade the sits shown in the reports: permitted, not permitted, indifferent. Too many bad actors rip off RSS feeds on splogs.
A tool for reporting errors in bibliographic information in Google Print/Books. As a researcher, this one is hugely important to me. This would be particularly sweet if Google Print would recognize my Google cookie and then enable a special flag or something I could click.
A place to submit URLs of sites that we believe are content-wise like our own; that is, to associate ourselves consciously to our *preferred* cohort. This is a little diferent from “disavow backlinks,” because it’s a carrot action rather than a stick. Lots of trust issues come into play here.
A way to grade backlinks. Disavowing is fine, but I’d like to rate *why* sites being disavowed: spam site, adult site, etc.
Grant Barrett Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:53 am
In telling Google the correct country for a site, it would be good if a) you could pull this information from an AdWords campaign we are running under the same login and b) if we can choose more than one country, a whole continent, or even metropolitan areas.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:13 am
While I voted for, and have long been a proponent of, the idea of being able to pick a country of origin for a site, I’d like to add a small qualifier: only those sites with a non-country TLD should be able to do so, to avoid the possibility of Bob claiming his site is UK-based with a .ca TLD on a Norwegian server and gaining an unfair advantage, however slight (that’s a strictly hypothetical example, for those who may get upset about it.)
Other than that, there’s nothing there on that list that I’d love to see, and a few things I personally wouldn’t want to see (PageRank checking, rank checking, server issues, etc.) Many of these things lead to confusion and overstated importance of issues.
Sourav Sharma Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:32 am
Matt, Google is doing good and I really liked your poll…
Can’t you provide us an option so that we can vote for more than 1 option….
As there were few on which we all are intrested….
But any way we really want to see all of these on our Web.Central….
Can’t we have some kind of trend report….
Michele Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:39 am
Two issues not raised…
Some way to find out if a site has been banned from either Google Search or Adsense before it is purchased. It’s become such a crap shoot to purchase a domain that may have been used before. Don’t see why domains that have expired and are banned couldn’t be listed somewhere.
While I like the idea of offering me the corrected spelling of a search term i.e., Did you mean? I do not think that should ever be used in conjunction with domains. If I search for my one of my own domains I get a Did you mean for another site - the only things that are even close to matching are the first 3 letters (pet), the last (s) and that they are both 13-letter dot coms. Both sites are about completely different things and both are far from being “authority sites”.
Download all the pages from a site? Wouldn’t that make it even easier for the scrapers?
Kevin Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:48 am
Hi Matt,
I think the duplicate content one is the most vital. On large dynamically generated sites it’s almost impossible to try and track down which pages are duplicates and why. It would be great as well to have a tool to tell you how much of you page is useful to Google. i.e. how much of the page Google actually regards as usable content, excluding code, headers, footers, etc.
Also, I think a supplemental section would be extremely useful. An area where you can see what pages are supplementalised and why, and which pages for a particular search are are more relevant and why they are not supplemental and mine are.
Thanks
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:49 am
I just thought of something that isn’t on this list: more tools for reporting spam manipulation attempts where a query isn’t generated. For example, I’ve got an email in my Hotmail account from a “major name” in Internet marketing promoting a new scam marketing opportunity specifically geared toward Google, but there’s no query for it…it would be a lot easier if there were a spot to just forward this stuff on, if at all possible.
Michael VanDeMar Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 8:25 am
Matt, before I vote, could you please clarify:
Thanks!
-Michael
Michael VanDeMar Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 8:28 am
Oh, Matt, and another idea… you already show some sort of ranking, as long as you rank ok and someone has already searched on the phrase.
What about extending that to show ranking history. I mean, does Google save that data? Isn’t that something that could be shown retroactively, with nice pretty graphs and numbers?
-Michael
netmeg Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 8:44 am
The things that have cropped up that are most important to me this year are:
- The ability to tell Google which domain should be indexed when multiple domains point to the same site (right now I’m handling it with PHP and multiple robots.txt files)
- SOME kind of facility to make it easy to move a site from one domain to another, or to combine domains (I’ve had three clients bought out by other companies this year alone)
- The ability to disavow backlinks would be VERY good. I have a lot of crap pointing to my sites.
- I would like to be able to list all my sites (currently at 67 but will be adding more) on the dashboard, instead of having to jump around from page to page, which takes a long time to load.
- In line with the above, the javascript Sites button on the right does not work properly if you have any number of sites in your account - you can’t scroll, because the minute you take your mouse off it, it goes away.
- I would like all the stuff that is supposed to work in the site: and link: commands to actually work properly in GWT.
- I would love to be able to generate nice looking PDF reports for my clients out of the console, a la Analytics.
- Keep everything updated on a reasonably consistent schedule, and if there ARE delays, send us a message. For a while there, I went for months without a backlink update, a crawl stats update, or a query stats update. In fact, it would be even cooler if the date of last update could be posted somewhere on the page.
- If we’re stuck with High, Medium, etc for pagerank, at least provide a frame of reference - I have some PR4 urls that are considered Medium, and others that are considered Low, and other weirdnesses.
- It’s nice to see when Google last crawled the home page, but usually I’d like to know when Google last looked at some OTHER page on the site.
That’s for starters - I have more.
sergio Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 8:54 am
The possibility to choose the canonical domain when a website is under two or more different domains (similar to the with-www/without-www setting).
Canal Rat Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 8:59 am
the three things I want Google to do aren’t really technology based.
(1) sort out your process for resolving infringments of copyright or terms of use. I got a pleasant and helpful response from Technorati within a day. I’m still waiting for google to respond.
(2) provide a contact service on your daughter sites that does not require me to (a) sign up or (b) search for 15 minutes to find it. Yes this means you will need some people sitting around in a service centre waiting to help customers. Deal with it.
(3) kill the spammers. Don’t let people hijack your addresses to send out remoate spam. Spam is killing networks and so much of it is fraud that it is damaging the reputation of other companies. How long before one of those companies sues you as being the vehicle for spam? Fix it. Now.
PS: I’d be fine with paying for blogger/gmail but frankly you’ve got the cash to resolve all of these.
Doug Heil Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 9:09 am
Maybe just the items that help a site actually “improve” the site as far as errors and the like, but why give spammers more tools that tells them exactly what is wrong? I’m with Adam on the idea of not putting stuff in there that is truly not important and could easily be done by looking at one’s own stats.
PR, rank stuff, etc? I don’t think so.
Michael; Don’t you already offer free rank check tools and many other kinds of such tools? I think many out there offer the same types of silly tools.
Jonathan Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 9:12 am
You report 404 errors. I can easily find broken links on my own site, but I am left guessing if there’s a broken external link to my site from another site. That information isn’t secret, so why don’t you tell me the page that has the broken link so I can contact that webmaster and ask them to fix it?
Michael Martinez Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 9:14 am
Why on Earth did you include “Show PageRank numbers”? That’s just a total waste of resources and the people who voted for it — while I am sure they are wonderful people — really need to learn to stop obsessing over TBPR.
Nice Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 9:15 am
When will the posibility to vote end?
Matt Cutts Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 9:23 am
Wow–almost 600 votes in about 8 hours. Thanks for the feedback, everybody.
Michael VanDeMar, suppose you look at backlinks and see that some come from a spammy site or scraper. That option would let you say “Don’t count those links; I have nothing to do with that site.”
Sourav Sharma, what sort of trend report are you looking for? Google Analytics is really strong at that..
Deb, my WordPress plug-in only allows one vote per person, but in the future I’ll see if I can find something that would allow multiple votes per person.
Kevin Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 9:53 am
I’m surprised no one has mentioned this… But where is “Integrate with Google Account”?
My google account already has my AdSense and AdWords, why wouldn’t there be a way to integrate the Webmaster console as well?
Bonus: I won’t have to revalidate that the website in question is mine if my cookies go away… which means I can get rid of that file… which means I can get rid of the exclusion rule from robots.txt and from sitemap generator…
Kevin
http://technogeek.org/
mark Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 10:01 am
As many people said there should be multiple option to select. Another feature I like to see is, integrated view of webmaster central, google anlytics, adsense together.
Ray Burn Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 10:29 am
Hi Matt,
I voted for the tool to tell Google the target country/language.
3 reasons:
1. This has to help Google, the User and the Webmaster
2. Many still report problems or query issues with this stuff - .com hosted in UK aimed at UK but ranking better on Google.com - same issues not applying to .co.uk domains etc
3. It is more about helping (ultimately) users rather than helping webmasters doing their job
Sure - error reporting stuuf is good too - but this one stuck out as way the most important - by miles
g1smd Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 10:32 am
*** The ability to tell Google which domain should be indexed when multiple domains point to the same site (right now I’m handling it with PHP and multiple robots.txt files) ***
You should be able to handle all of that with just a few lines of redirect code in your .htaccess file. You’ll need a 301 redirect. Google for “Mod_Rewrite” for more.
Ant Onaf Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 10:40 am
Matt,
I voted for the “some type of page ranking” option. I would like to see some type of future page rank from Google, this will help webmasters know if their marketing efforts are working and being recognized by Google. If I see Google has a positive future prediction then I know what I am doing is correct and will continue on the same path, if I see Google has a negative future prediction then I would assume what I am doing is not working or is wrong and can revamp my marketing efforts. Basically, it would be nice to know if I am going down the right path when marketing or if my marketing efforts are going unrecognized by Google, this will help webmasters to modify their marketing campaign to get the best possible results. I wouldn’t expect this to be something so solid that it helps everyone ranking, because I understand Google and search engines don’t like SEO, but it would be nice to know how well Google is receiving marketing efforts and if it is having a positive or negative effect. I would like to know how Google predicts my site and site ranking. thx
g1smd Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 10:44 am
*** Finding all broken links within a site ***
Programs like Xenu Linksleuth can quickly analyse a whole site and produce a report of all broken links, time-out links, and all links that then pass through a redirect for both internal and outgoing external links. Those can then be fixed and the program run again to verify that the fix has worked.
netmeg Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 10:44 am
Thanks to you I know that already, and I can handle it in .htaccess - when I’m hosting the site(s) myself, or have enough access to be able to do that or advise the webmaster to do so. But sometimes, for reasons involving security, company politics, and just bureaucratic BS, I can’t use that method, or at least can’t get it done quickly enough. Company buyouts are a bitch.
Nick - I think the original Nick here. Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 11:30 am
I’d like to add a way to see all outgoing links from our site and the timeline of when they were added.
The reason being that I’d like to see of anyone hacks or spams the site and seeing outgoing links could be a good way to monitor this from time to time.
How about also posting these changes in the message centre so when we log in to a site, we can see what’s new or what has changed.
300 links added
4 Page Not Found Errors
1 page disallowed by Robots.txt
Could be nice to have all that is different from the last login showing in one console.
Other than that they’re doing great but I’d also like to add my vote to ignoring links from one site so we can filter when a site is giving us a ton of links without going from page to page constantly.
Michael VanDeMar Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 11:49 am
Ok, that’s a teensy bit scary… you’re saying we need that? It’s something that will actually make a difference?
Something that we should not only definitely have access to, but something that we should actively be watching for? And a clear advantage/necessity to signing up for GWC, and edge over non-GWC signed up competitors who can get hurt without knowing it, and who would have no recourse even if they did…?
-Michael
Michael VanDeMar Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 11:52 am
Since this is important enough that they might be doing it next, why not just flag the ones we should be concerned about, and allow us to have a Google Alert style email if it happens? That way we wouldn’t have to scan through all those links every day, looking for warning signs.
Or maybe just put them on top of the other results…?
-Michael
g1smd Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:06 pm
You can already find all your outgoing links, and verify the status of the URL that they link to, using Xenu Linksleuth or similar.
You can see if it returns 200, 301, 302, 401, 402, 403, 404, 500, or simply times out. It takes minutes to make these checks.
Michael VanDeMar Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:08 pm
g1smd, he’s not talking about who you link out to, he’s talking about links coming in.
Matt Ellsworth Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:09 pm
those all look great. but I like the information on the scoring the best. Also, the ability to find out when links are dead would be cool. We manage a lot of sites with thousands of pages and any help we get would be great.
Michael VanDeMar Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:09 pm
Edit - My bad, you were replying above me.
-Michael
corey Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:22 pm
spiffy poll. i voted for the more info about duplicate content issues, but i just thought of this…
when looking at the errors, like “Unreachable URLs”, i click the links to see if the page really errors. more times than not, the URLs in this list are not broken because i’ve already fixed the problem. if there was a “no longer a problem” link i could click that might help G schedule recrawls.
you suggested “Fetch a page as Googlebot to verify correct behavior”. if you could put that on the error pages to verfiy that Googlebot won’t get an error, webmasters could quickly fix and dismiss site problems.
Merlin Silk Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:25 pm
Hi Matt,
yes, a tool that gives me information WHY that one site of mine is not indexed deeper - espite this site having many really written pages, the main page ranked at 4 with a sitemap and everything I could imagine done right
I am on my knees - please Google, tell me what - WHAT did I do to scorn you?
That tool would be like my prayer being heard.
Second in line would be to define the country and language of sites/pages because I have a dedicated server in Germany (best prices by far) and I don’t want this to be mistaken for a Germany only site.
Merlin
Merlin Silk Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:32 pm
Hi Matt,
what is that plugin here in the comment submission asking me math questions? I want that, looking for something like that for a while.
Cheers
Merlin
psb Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:49 pm
I have voted for “Ability to show/download all pages from a site (e.g. if your server crashed)” and I hope (when and/or if this becomes a feature) that it will also include the PHP/ASP/JS/CSS stuff in it, otherwish it will have no use, you could use the google cache for this. So, if it does not include ALL my scripts I would like to see a way to “spy” on the competition.. Just to have a little taste for what they have been up to and why Google seems to have a bias for them
Joe Griffin Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 12:54 pm
The authenticated Webmaster communication is awesome. I think penalty notifications are very important, and this is the best place to inform site owners of these penalities.
aks Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 1:04 pm
Though I did vote, I think that before any further expansion, it would be great if the Webmaster Console proved to be a reliable and up-to-date source of the information it already “provides”.
What I find there:
- no messages even when you are evidently penalized (like, say, mattcutts.com/blog being dead last for the string “Matt Cutts”)
- no updates on “Query stats” for 2-3 weeks even though it says “All data is averaged over the last 7 days”
- an “External links” list so unstructured it borders on useless
- contradicting information about “highest PageRank” (seeing a PR5 page of a site being shown as the highest, while having PR6 pages on the same site - one or another is obviously misleading)
- Googlebot activity stats clearly out of sync with actual search database updates (the console says approx. 50% of the pages of a site are revisited every day on average; the SERP shows most of those - not stale, regularly changing - pages with a cache date of 2 weeks to 2 months). Or perhaps Googlebot does most of its visits solely for fun, not to actually update the cache?
So for all the flood of love and congratulations on how great Google does in terms of webmaster communications, quite a couple of issues should be tackled, perhaps, for Webmaster Console to be of “Google quality”. Currently it certainly isn’t.
JLH Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
“Option to “disavow” backlinks from or to a site” scares me a bit. Isn’t something like this going down the path that the old axiom that ‘external sites cannot hurt you’ no longer is valid? Do we really want to replace the paid links economy with the paid-competitor-destroyer economy?
“Show pages that don’t validate” seems to add credence to validation is required to achieve rankings, which has been disavowed officially in the GWHG FAQ pages.
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/web/faqs-for-crawling-indexing-and-ranking-2
As far as new features; before adding spinners and a new sound system to this car, I’d try to get the engine in it first. The statistics that are currently shown are often out of date. New sites get stuck in a seemingly eternal “no data is available at this time” place. It appears that the statistics are tied into popularity of the site, which is counter-intuitive to me. Does wiki log into their webmaster tools account every day to see how they are doing in the #1 spot for all their terms? I doubt it. It’s the site that’s struggling to find their place in this web world that needs the helpful information that the tools provide. I’ve been a proponent of sitemaps since inception but now I rarely even bother with it for new sites as I know it’s just not worth the effort to ftp a simple file to the root for statistics that just won’t be there.
The word “Pending” has got to be the most frustrating thing to see as a feedback I’ve ever seen. It’s just so open ended. I wish that could be tightened up a bit with some sort of estimate (years, weeks, days, hours) anything. Even the cable company lets me know how long I’ll have to wait on hold to talk to a human, I’d like to see the same when I am sweating out a URL removal.
I didn’t intend this to be a rip on webmaster tools, unfortunately it kind of sounds like that right now, I’m sorry. I love what you’ve all done so far, I just wish it would be improved a bit before expending energies on new projects.
Donal Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:19 pm
I’ve voted for more information on penalties or other scoring issues - if you remember back a bit, I used to complain here about the lack of information on scoring. I started my site in 2004, hoping by hard work and frequent updating to become an established commentator on a particular type of business strategy. On Yahoo, I’m number 34 for the subject matter, which is about what I’d expect. At this stage I can say that I am reasonably well known in my area of interest.
But this has come despite, rather than because of Google websearch, where I’m anywhere from the 200’s down. I get ten times as many referrals from Google Image Search than from ordinary web search (I signed up for enhanced image search on the console). I do well on Google blog search. Also on Technorati and others.
The most annoying thing is how I see big media sites break so many of Google’s guidelines (massive amounts of on-page advertising, duplicate content repeated word for word from Reuters or other primary source, non-relevant links, cross-linking etc.) and there’s no talk of them being penalised. It seems to be very much a case of one law for the big guy and another for the little guy.
Do I want more information? Oh, yes. From day one I always seemed to be crawling up a steep slippery slope, from the trials of the sandbox to dropping hundreds of places for no obvious reason. After all this time, no one can tell me the site homepage isn’t filtered downwards for the main phrase.
So anything that can be done to provide more information through the console is welcome. I’m convinced that sites and pages have a sort of credit history in Google’s data. I also believe that this history can be wrong. So a historical record of the status of a page would also be a very good idea, with an opportunity for webmasters to put right mistakes in some way.
I’ll go away and leave you alone for a year now!
Toby Adams Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 3:53 pm
An up or down arrow to show the last move of my Query stats. This would be a quick visual on how the site is doing (going generally up or down) and which queries are slipping and need some attention.
Marc Rasmussen Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
Great post Matt. Google is impressive by continuing to improve upon the better mousetrap they have already built.
Since I recently came out of a 60 day penalty I obviously voted on “More information about penalties or other scoring issues”. I would have corrected the problem immediately if I had received an email from Google. If possible, a clear explanation of how to correct would be nice. Although, that might be impossible with the massive number of sites out there.
Mike Dammann Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 5:53 pm
I definitely vote for all of the above.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:22 pm
I’d love to see the idea I just came up with. It would be incredibly difficult to pull off, given the manipulability by blackhats, but if anyone can pull it off, Big G can.
I’ve seen a large number of automated form spam requests made as of late, all of which contain both HTML and vB-encoded hyperlinks (with requisite SEO-based anchor text). What I’d like to be able to do is to send an XML file of those requests containing the spammy information over to you guys, which you’d then be able to use to determine the legit ones from the fakes and punish (or not punish) accordingly.
As someone who gets at least 40-50 contact form spams a day, I’d love to be able to report it via an automated means.
jason Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 6:46 pm
Voted for Dup Content, though the second vote would be for Penalties…
Dave (original) Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:13 pm
Good stuff Matt, thanks, I voted for a broken link checker.
However, I’m concerned that Google is feeding the link and PR frenzy that already exists. Most of the feature voting options had something to do with PR, links, bans and penalties.
I do hope Google is not falling into the trap of giving the squeakiest wheels the most oil?
hlvis Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
I’ve been thinking it for a while Peden202 said it… I just checked M.I.T. is ranking for Buy Viagra search http://cef.mit.edu/other/gen2/?Buy-N-Viagra …C’mon already… Competitors spamming all over the place blatantly…trying to play fair… Adding more webmaster tools features versus handling the meat and potatoe issues of the volume of spam does not seem the right choice.
Please act on spam reports. Please communicate with those filing spam reports. SERP quality is going downhill… My advice used to be if you want to learn about anything go to Google. Nowadays my advice is go to Wikipedia…then maybe you can go to a search engine…
Dave (original) Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 7:36 pm
I don’t get where you are coming from with that reason Matt. Surely Google would ONLY see a connection to the said site IF the site is linking back to the “spammy site or scraper”?
Jerry Peters Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 9:03 pm
I voted for “More information about penalties or other scoring issues” but the real issue is the lack of communication when Google decides something is wrong with a website. I lost 80% of my Google organic search traffic on July 12 after years of steadily increasing traffic from Google organic search and I don’t have a clue as to what has caused Google to suddenly downgrade the site. The Adsense staff, who does respond to e-mail, were sympathetic but they can’t help me and there is no one to contact at Google natural search. So here I sit in the dark, frustrated, wondering what I’m supposed to do next . . .
I understand why Google may not wish to communicate with blatant abusers of its system, but what about sites that have been around as long as Google and have a clean history?
Harini Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 10:45 pm
Hey Matt,
How are you thinking of these features…. really cool, I have voted my opinion
Cheers,
Harini
Rich Pargeter Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
Hi Matt,
I’d love to see all of the above options but particulary the first “More information about penalties or other scoring issues”. This is always the source of confusion for webmaster when they think they are trying to achieve white hat SEO and sometimes there could be some penalty that is out of their(?) control.
Another one i’d add to the list is a time value on the reports of crawling. When looking into network unreachable, gateway 504 issues in an organisation it would useful to have a timestamp with the date so we can try to pinpoint problems. With world timezones this is difficult but maybe an option to convert from say GMT (maybe we need Google time
) to the webmasters local time in their profile?
Regards,
Rich.
Pratheep Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 11:05 pm
Matt,
I feel the below is the most important thing for a website to make it perfect, ofcourse i accept that the first option is also required.
“Show pages that don’t validate”
Can you please change the voting system, as one can select many option?
Thanks, Pratheep
Corla Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 11:26 pm
I voted for “Some type of rank checking”, its more imp. to me to check my ranks on google, than others.
Lauri Said,
July 23, 2007 @ 11:59 pm
# Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
Languages - hell, no!! There are on-page ways to say which language it is. Google must not create a gray area for this.
Countries - there should be on-page ways for this as well. Can you imagine users going to 5 search engines to say for which country it is meant instead of saying it on-page.
You can give warnings for these being missing, though!
# Show links on your site that are broken
This is what I voted for. I’ve recently stumbled upon several maintained sites that have broken links on them (usually to third party sites).
# Score the crawlability or accessibility of pages
Thumbs up.
Definitely display these as warnings:
- All the weird things and bad practices your indexer has to compensate for should be included as warnings.
- Dynamic, session ID URLs, infinite loops as warnings.
# Tool to help move from one domain to a new domain
This is what HTTP 301 was invented for. Or use on-page/on-site redirection methods to handle this for sites that cannot produce headers. robots.txt perhaps.
# More information about penalties or other scoring issues
This would be nice, although I’m sure it’s tricky for you to do so.
# Tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content
Giving hints to site owners about which pages are considered duplicate would be of use. It will make the benefit of creating original content more visible.
Reporting pages to Google on which pages are duplicate (if that’s what you mean) is of little use. You cannot police the web on content stealing (though there has been several occasions I’ve wished you could) and duplicate content within a site should be strictly “noindex” by sites.
# Tell Google a parameter doesn’t matter
It *must* not be in Webmaster Central. If added, it *must* be in robots.txt.
# Diagnostic wizard for common site problems
Yes.
# Some type of rank checking
Supercool, but sounds like quite a big thing to get done.
# Show causes of 404 errors
Ok.
# Option to “disavow” backlinks from or to a site
I agree with Ian and Philipp above. What’s up?
# Show pages that don’t validate
Yes!
# More documentation and examples
Yes.
Other issues:
# Ability to show/download all pages from a site (e.g. if your server crashed)
Backups are the responsibility of content owners.
# Fetch a page as Googlebot to verify correct behavior
The other items on the list should be able to take care of this.
# A way to list supplemental result pages
Don’t care for this.
# Integrate “Add URL” feature
Perhaps.
# Show PageRank numbers instead of none/low/medium/high
Hmmm. Maybe.
Sourav Sharma Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 12:13 am
Yes Matt, Our Analytics is having that….But can we have something like say - a graph to highlight the progress of our keywords just in percentage or may be with red or green bar - see the point is - for related stats we need to go to analytics account - so just for the sake of building a bridge between yout 2 services…
Again, here you are showing the avg positions but in GA - we don’t have that feature,….so I think there is surely something we can do here so as to make things easier for us to manage….
how about that….a common dashboard for both the application, where we can keep our favs report….and can also combine 2 reports to get some kind of graph…..
These are my wild thoughts - may be you can get something from here to make things more savvy for all webmasters….
What do you think…????
Sourav
Harith Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 12:18 am
So far 1018 votes but only 37 voted on:
* A way to list supplemental result pages
There must be something wrong with the poll software.
C’mon. Give the above suggestion some love, please
Azam Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 12:35 am
I think a good function to have is a form for webmasters to tell Googlebot not to crawl the site when it is scheduled to go down due to server maintenance or something else. This not only results better efficiency for crawling activities, but can help to relieve some unnecessary anxieties on the part of webmasters whenever they go through this process. (I think telling Googlebot not to come when the site is not ready is better than relying on the 503 status code to tell it to come back again later (when??).)
I’m sure Googlbot will appreciate the reprieve of having to come knocking on a door again and again when it should know the owner is not home.
Shane Jones Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 12:53 am
Hey Good post,
Can we not just do all of the above, it will keep the Team busy
Shane
dockarl Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 1:05 am
Hmm… Way to know if your site is under penalty seems to be a clear winner - and I’m sure it’s something the webmaster tools folks would dearly love to implement - hell, I even voted for that one.
What I’ve often wondered is HOW you would do that without actually giving spammers the heads up about exactly just how far they can go before getting penalised.
Confirmation of a penalty WITH specific reasons for that penalty could be quite instructional if you have 5000 separate sites testing variations of the latest SE indexing exploit.
Confirmation of a penalty WITHOUT specific reasons for that penalty equals frustration / distress for the good guys who can’t work out why they might have a penalty.
I think everyone wants to avoid penalty fratricide where possible but I just can’t for the life of me think of a good, equitable solution that doesn’t potentially lead to a spammier index.
doc
Errioxa Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 1:28 am
Hello Mutt.
I’m Lino Uruñuela from Spain.
In Europe we have many difficulties at the moment of proving to be resulted in the local search.
In order that a domain appears in Google Local’s version, we must fulfill one of the following requirements:
-Ip local
-domain local .es .de etc
-Links of local domain
This is a error. For a little time we have seen like to these factors they are very important and I think that this isn’t better way.
The ip should not have any importance, since the companies of hosting here are very disappointing and we contract the hosting in USA.
And this one must not be a determinant factor. The same thing with the domains .es or .de or .it
There will be some solution to these problems?
Because in this survey, the majority that answers is from USA and they do not have these problems.
Thanks, Lino Uruñuela.
Errioxa Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 1:31 am
Another thing, why do not they make the ping of the blogs slightly similar to know the one who wrote the content and this way to know before the doubt which is the duplicated content?
It’s very easy
garethjax Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 1:35 am
Too bad you can’t cast 2 votes, for me scoring issues and content duplication are equally important, but at the moment i’ve voted for the first one
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 2:09 am
Matt,
As you can see “More information about penalties or other scoring issues” was a clear winner.
The 950 penalty created a lot of collateral damage.
Reconsideration requests go unanswered.
No messages in the “Message Center”.
Communicate, PLEASE!
Richie Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 2:11 am
I don’t know if it has been said before in this post, too many to read - but I would like to see the proper brake down of google monthly results so we can see the most popular search terms.
I don’t know if there is a tool that does it already but it would be extremely useful.
Simon Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 3:02 am
My suggestion would be a better keyword suggestion tool. Overture kicks ass for this and for a very simple reason. They give a number as a measure of searches. Googles little graph things are too inaccurate when search volumes are low, and it doesn’t give you enough indication of which keywords you should be concentrating on.
Personally I only use adwords, but I do my research in Overture, which I think is a bit sad.
Dave (original) Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 3:28 am
I say leave the spammers in the dark and tell them zip, then point them to the Guidelines.
Come on Google (Matt), don’t cater to the spammers, cater to the majority who don’t spam.
gbacchin Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 3:28 am
Hi Matt,
I’m with Lino on the country-local issue. My vote is for “Tell Google the correct country or language for a site”.
I found particularly difficult to obtain good rankings when selecting the filter “pages in {country}”.
I would still love to have ALL features though.
Thanks
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 4:07 am
Come-on! Dave (original),
“I say leave the spammers in the dark and tell them zip, then point them to the Guidelines.”
There are a lot of non-spammers with the 950 penalty - believe me!
Doug Heil Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:02 am
There is totally no way Google or ANY search engine should give a heads up to sites of penalities, etc. That is totally crazy stuff Matt. Sorry. If you all do that, your index will be totally overrun by those out there who would love to know exactly how far they can go before they trip the spam filter at any given time. It’s lunacy to think Google would do this.
dockarl summed things up nicely, and I’ll repost it just so you all see it again, and then again:
“What I’ve often wondered is HOW you would do that without actually giving spammers the heads up about exactly just how far they can go before getting penalised.
Confirmation of a penalty WITH specific reasons for that penalty could be quite instructional if you have 5000 separate sites testing variations of the latest SE indexing exploit.
Confirmation of a penalty WITHOUT specific reasons for that penalty equals frustration / distress for the good guys who can’t work out why they might have a penalty.
I think everyone wants to avoid penalty fratricide where possible but I just can’t for the life of me think of a good, equitable solution that doesn’t potentially lead to a spammier index.”
Rebekah Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:08 am
Matt,
Just wanted to say that I really love your blog - you have provided incredibly useful information and insights and I thank you
I have been reading for a long time and just thought I would say hello.
I would like some more information on link value and penalties - some kind of scoring breakdown - although I know that is a lot to ask! But those are the things that remain somewhat illusive - Links are interesting - for instance webmasters who are attaining top ten rankings by simply pumping out a lot of template sites and domains and linking them all to each other. Yes they are contextually relevant, but not valid, useful sites. I know I am only seeing a tiny piece of the linking enigma, but that is the one thing that I would really like to learn more about.
Duplicate content, relevant content, site structure - all of that stuff has always made sense. Building with best practices always pays off in the long run. However, I would be interested to know more about penalties, ranking info, etc., especially as you continue to modify how you score/track links.
Anyway, love Google analytics and love webmaster tools! Thanks!
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:29 am
“There is totally no way Google or ANY search engine should give a heads up to sites of penalities, etc.”
Fine, then don’t penalize sites for no reason.
I repeat - There are a lot of non-spammers with the 950 penalty - believe me!
Something has got to be done!
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:47 am
Robert,
dockarl hit it on the head and answered your comment before you made it. The problem with your statement is that, in at least 99.9% of cases, someone has done something silly to trigger what they believe to be a penalty (usually with some random number based on a small sampling of other sites that are affected by the mysterious non-existent penalty, such as -30 or -950.) Google can’t reveal every reason, nor should they…many of the reasons sites get penalized are the same reasons sites would suffer if there were no search engines involved (link exchanges, spammy promotional techniques, etc.) Chances are that if you’re complaining, you’re doing something wrong whether you realize it or not.
You’re also forgetting that, if those penalties did exist, they’re not all bad. In order for a site to move down in the rankings, at least one has to move up to take its place. So at most, your penalty problem negatively affects 50% of the sites for any given search term, and the odds are strongly in favour that it’s less than 50%. Why would Google cater to the minority in this instance?
Right now, all you’re doing is making a generic statement about a penalty that doesn’t exist with no evidence to back it up and a plea for action to solve a non-issue. Why would Google or anyone else do anything about that? Would you, if someone complained about your business?
Seriously, this -X penalty crap has got to stop. It’s old, it never existed, and it’s just an excuse designed to placate SEO wannabes rather than force people to take a hard look at their promotional tactics and realize what they’re doing wrong.
So yeah….ixnay onway ethay oringscay, easeplay.
Chris Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:51 am
Ops, sorry, where I wrote “Show pages that don’t validate” twice, one should have read “More information about penalties or other scoring issues”.
Doug Heil Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:52 am
hmmm Robert; There are also many of us who have been developing sites with seo in mind for over ten years now with “no” penalites whatsoever. You say for “no reason”…. I’m thinking there is always a reason, even if it’s a “mistake” by Google or something. The point is that giving specifics to a site would allow any se spammer out there who researches to the ninth degree with mulitple “test” sites and domains, could easily do very well in Google by toeing that spam line/filter if they know “exactly” what caused the penalty.
But anyway; a penalty that is a mistake by Google are very, very few these days. The chances of a site getting penalized unfairly is getting less and less as we go. Build a great site with great content, and stay away from “link schemes” designed to game Google, and the site will be fine. Stay away from certain forums and places who promote these link schemes and you will be fine as well. Build the site for humans.
Doug Heil Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:55 am
oh, and what Adam said as well.
Ryan Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:56 am
As we have more and more clients on the webmaster console, I’d like to make one simple suggestion. On AdWords My Client Center, there is a simple drop down box that allows you to quickly find the client you wish to go to… It’s called “Jump to client” and it’s found in the upper left area of the MCC.
Plus I voted for more info on penalties. Anything and everything you can give us would be valuable… also information we can share with clients, in simple English that they can understand, would be very much appreciated.
Lauri Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:04 am
About the last 5-6 comments.
The thing with penalties and detecting fraud in general is that it’s a numbers game. Good stuff does get penalized sometimes. The trick is to keep the false positives to a limit and learning to live with them (while trying to improve and get new information vectors whenever possible) and applying a manual process to handle complaints.
If the spammers and black hats are any good, they do a good job on their content, so it could not be distinguished from the rest, but take it to the limit to get an unfair edge over others.
If the “baddies” get clear information (or for some things even just hints) about the critical parts of the detection algo, they will screw up the listings and make it unusable for everybody else. If Google were to communicate non-critical parts of the algo, though, then that would be useless information, as it does not contribute to anything anyway.
Also - top positions are not and can not be taken for granted. The ugly truth.
If there is money in it, there’s money to be made in manipulating it.
AussieWebmaster Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:09 am
Now this had an impressive number of responses…. and some insights…. how about adding the thumbs up thing like seomoz has…. you could work out who is the leader of the cutletts.
how about adding a box with your top 5 posters
webado Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:10 am
Yes, all or most of them would be useful. Many of us know external tools to accomplish almost all of this, but many webmasters are not aware of them or don’t consider their results important in any way as far as being indexed in Google goes.
If those tools and their results as applied to each site were part of Webmaster Tools as more than just mere recommendations hidden in Help Pages (which so few read and even fewer relate to their own sites), you’d go a long way towards reducing the number of threads in the Group asking for the arrogant “what’s wrong with Google” or the more humble “what’s wrong with my site”.
I thus voted for a diagnostic wizard for most problems, hoping that “most” truly covers the most common ones and also the sneaky, yet common ones.
Sravan Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:10 am
hey matt,
All are cool tools, that every webmaster needs them. I request team to work and get every thing to be done asap.
Hamlet Batista Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:17 am
How about a Webmaster Central’s API?
A commercial API to Google Search would be nice too.
Doug Heil Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:18 am
yeah, and you Aussie could work out who is the leader of your inner circle of buddies, and do so at seomoz as well. Heck; I could name all the members of the inner circle.
And yes; the thread is a good one. Giving spammers a heads up on anything is not so good however, so we have to speak out about it. Sorry if that is not okay with you. You should write about it at the seomoz blog….. oh, and also write about it at sphinn and even SPHINN IT .
You all would get a kick out of it.
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:21 am
Well, there are people here with their heads in the sand.
There are sites getting penalized for nothing, while sites that Should Be don’t.
It’s time for a level playing field.
Matt,
If you want examples I got them.
Volsano Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:27 am
I’d love to see an option of Google search to only show pages that validate.
That would remove 99% of the clutter, spam, and potential fuzz attacks to which I am exposed every day.
Sites that validate are sites that care (or care enough to use tools that actually work). It’d be one of the biggest steps forward Google could offer in improving the quality of the Web
Doug Heil Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:27 am
Yes Robert, I certainly agree with you on that one.
You should post the examples you have as that way not only Matt but others can help you figure it all out.
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:34 am
I won’t post them on an open forum for obvious reasons.
If you want to take a look - let me know how to forward the info.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:40 am
Matt’s not going to do that, Robert. He’s made that clear on here on more than one occasion. You can give up that line of thinking right now…it’ll save you some grief.
There are no obvious reasons for not wanting to post a site that is allegedly penalized…and it usually means you’re trying to hide something.
So show ‘em.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:45 am
Damn right what I said, Doug. I’m da MAN. Don’t forget it, either.
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:46 am
“sites that Should Be don’t” Ever hear of the word competitors?
I not trying to hide anything.
It has been nothing but grief.
netmeg Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:54 am
I don’t know as I’d call it a penalty exactly, but I did experience the “950″ phenomenon back at the end of May, with two of the most important pages on my main site. Put me in a panic, as my busiest season was just around the corner. Overnight, the primary search strings for those two pages, which had previously returned my site in the top five were relegated to the back of the bus (whichever the last page was at the time of the search. Reversing the search terms left me on top, and even adding 2007 helped - but most people didn’t bother doing that. The other 400+ pages came up just fine in the top spots for their search strings (each page is a city name with a list of events) I ended up removing a couple instances of the words from the title tags and pages themselves, and that tipped me back up again; took about ten days.
Earlier in the year we experienced practically the same thing with a friend’s very small site devoted to a particular comic movie team. It disappeared for the main searches to the last available search page, while still coming up for some less popular searches. After a while, it popped back to #1 for everything, only this time we hadn’t done anything to it at all.
Was that a penalty, or just an algorithm weirdness, or…? I have no idea. But the phenomenon does seem to exist, whatever you want to call it. There’s and endless thread on WMW about it.
Robert Schroeder Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 7:58 am
“I ended up removing a couple instances of the words from the title tags and pages