How Google sabotages your SEO efforts

The SEO community loves SEO tools, even tools that don’t work. Google loves gadgets, even gadgets that don’t work. This is a love story designed for misery.

Search engine optimizers need information and most of us will look at just about anything to get information, even information we feel may be unreliable because any light in the dark seems better than no light at all. Through the years I’ve devoted more hours to playing with dumb SEO tools than I care to remember.

Google just loves to invent stuff. It’s got thousands of employees, many of whom are privileged with the experience of helping launch new tools for Webmasters. The whole Webmaster Tools concept has been treated like a Godsend by search engine optimizers. And I do use Google’s Webmaster Tools so I know it can be useful, but there are some very quirky things in Webmaster Tools that I wish were either fixed or didn’t exist at all.

Let’s start with the search optimizer’s favorite playground: links. A lot of people will tell you they are grateful to work with Webmaster Tool’s backlink reports. Me? I’ve stopped caring. I was never impressed to begin with since the data was incomplete, out-of-date, and didn’t distinguish between value-passing links and fluff links.

But what really kills me is the way I can find linking pages in Google’s index that have been there for a long time (with the links embedded), and the linking pages have recent cache dates, and they don’t appear in Webmaster Tool’s link reports. Google can show me a PR1 linking page but not a PR4 linking page? What’s up with that?

The discrepancies between cache dates and reported crawl dates for linking pages are numerous and consistent. If links really only pass value 3 times a year, then it’s no wonder a lot of people are frustrated with Google. I’ve often found that destination sites rank well for test anchor text which is not reported in Google’s Webmaster statistics. The cache will even tell you, “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page”, but the anchor text is nowhere to be found in Webmaster Tools.

Frankly, I find the link: query operator to be more useful than Webmaster Tools’ link reports. At least with the link: results you can be fairly certain that the data is consistent with what you’ll find in the Web search through other queries.

Another problem with Webmaster Tools is the verification process. I was mildly surprised the other day when one of my team members told me she was reverifying Web sites repeatedly. I mean, she would verify them and then the verification flag would be removed. I noticed a few of my own sites were no longer verified this week, so I reverified them. In doing so, I noticed that Googlebot had not crawled their home pages in months according to the Webmaster Tools report.

Odd. The Web search cache reports indicate the root URLs were all crawled within the last 30-40 days. What’s up with that?

I occasionally find inexplicable warnings and errors in XML sitemaps. Google apparently cannot find pages that exist. That one is hard to pin down because I have, in fact, found more broken links and bad page URLs because of those warning messages than I have found strange warnings. Sometimes I assume that Google had trouble fetching pages — but don’t look too closely at the crawl statistics because they may bust that bubble.

Webmaster Tools is not the only goofy service I’ve found that Google provides. A lot of people recommend Google Alerts. I used to subscribe to quite a few alerts but I got fed up with being told about “new” content that was several years old — repeatedly. It’s like there is this alert process that times out when nothing new comes along and it decides to throw something old at you just so you know it’s there. Frankly, I’d rather receive an email that says, “Hey, this is Google Alerts. You’re waiting for me to report new content on keyword X-Y-Z but I have nothing to show you. You might try running a query, however, as our search results change every day.”

I know people who swear by Google Alerts for “reputation management” but as far as I am concerned you’ll get better results by subscribing to Blog and News search. Or, better yet, just run your query once a day (everyone else is running daily queries, you might as well too).

Have you ever tried to set the canonical URL in Google’s Webmaster Tools, only to be told that it cannot verify your domain? That would be the same domain that you just verified in Webmaster Tools. That one drives me nuts. I can only guess there are two verification processes and one does not share data with the other. I have a few Web sites I cannot set canonical URLs for because I don’t have access to the servers at a level that lets me create whatever little domain records Google thinks should be there.

That’s okay. I can live without the reassurance of having set a canonical URL. It doesn’t seem to work anyway, as I have found queries where the non-www version of a supposedly canonically set www-based site appears in search results. That could, I suppose, be due to a lag time between Google’s recrawling and reindexing of the site and my setting the canonical URL. Sure.

It’s definitely not easy to manage the information for billions of Web sites. I understand that and I appreciate all the hard work Googlers put in to make life easier for searchers, Webmasters, and even optimizers. But the lack of discerning judgement some people in the SEO community show when it comes to evaluating tools just makes me roll my eyes.

The Google tools only tell us part of the story. When you can beat Google Alerts at finding new information, you should think carefully about advising people to trust their search reputation management to a few alert subscriptions. Yahoo! alerts have proven to be no better, in my opinion.

When you can find value-passing links in the Web search results that don’t appear in the Webmaster Tools report, do you really want to base your link building strategy on what Webmaster Tools tells you?

When you’re looking for crawl issues, and Webmaster Tools tells you everything is A-okay, do you have sufficient reason to ignore your own server logs?

And speaking of server logs, that brings me back to Google Analytics. Analytics is no better or worse than other Javascript-based traffic trackers. You’ll find that your visitors are under-reported, but where Analytics excels is in its presentation. They have lots of pretty graphics and I have to admit that I enjoy looking at the line charts and stuff.

I just wish the export function was useful. I mean, when you have referrals for a couple thousand keywords, having to download 20-30 pages (100 rows each) of CSV data is a real pain. And while I appreciate that Google’s presentation interface is cool and all that, it really sucks when it comes to organizing data the way I can in, say, a spreadsheet. There are many similar keyword expressions thta I just cannot place near each other in the Analytics interface.

Do you have any idea of how many variations on “Robert Irvine Dinner Impossible scandal” there are? I’m almost sorry I ever wrote about the poor guy’s reputation management issue. Just when I think I’m getting back to SEO referrals, there’s another 2 or 3 referrals for “Robert Irvine”. Yeah, I should probably stop using his name in the copy, but the damage is done. I’ve invaded his query space. All I ask is the ability to move stuff around in the tables.

Easily.

Analytics won’t tell you about your crawl issues, either. In fact, it won’t tell you much about how people move around your site at all. Oh, yeah, I’ve tried doing the map thing but what a pain it is get anything useful out of it. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I have gotten anything useful out of it. It’s a great idea but the implementation just doesn’t do anything for me. Literally.

So anyone who is basing their SEO analysis on Google Analytics is missing the big picture. If you cannot look at all the bad URL references and where they come from, a super-fancy-dancy hit counter isn’t really telling you much. Sure, you can look at trends (and trends data is very useful) but a fully robust analytics package should be able to help you find problems with your navigation and content.

At best the Google resources provide us with very small windows in a rather large wall. As a user of those tools I know I would rather have them than not have them, but I also know that I would like for them to be more useful. They really don’t meet my needs as an optimizer or as a Webmaster because they don’t show me the whole picture.

Google’s philosophy for Webmaster tools seems to be, “A small part of the picture is better than no part of the picture”, but I have to ask how much of that is based on the desire to withhold pertinent information and how much of it is based on the limitations imposed upon the technology by the sheer volume of data they collect.

Your search engine optimization analysis cannot be wholly dependent upon any one set of tools. You don’t have any useful backlink resources (and probably never shall). You don’t have any real indication of what people are doing on your site. And you don’t know which of your pages are your best performers (because Google won’t tell you which pages are receiving the referrals and link anchor text it does report).

In short, the Google resources provide us with spotty data that cannot be connected together. If that is as good as your SEO research gets, you’re in a heap’o'trouble.

This is not why you should use Yahoo! for your link research. Yahoo! cannot tell you about sites that Google has found (in fact, because of the bogus data in Yahoo!’s link reports, Yahoo! struggles to tell you about sites Yahoo! has found).

Nor is this why you should use [insert your favorite analytics package here].

The short-comings with Google’s tools merely illustrate just how poor the technology is across the board. You have to use more than one tool to paint the largest possible picture.