4. Rankings
Many people get obsessed with checking their rankings. Rankings do
have some correlation with traffic. However, do not spend too much time
on this activity. For one thing, many tools that are available today for
checking rankings scrape Google results, which is against Google’s
Webmaster Guidelines. Google results vary by user, and the scraped
results do not represent what everyone is seeing. Therefore, rankings
data is not as useful an indicator as many of the other metrics we have
discussed.
Rankings data can be helpful in a few scenarios, however:
Where a #1 (or a very high) ranking for a trophy search term
provides brand value
When there is a sudden significant change (such as a move from
position #5 to #50, or a similar change in the other
direction)
Where a long-term trend can be established, such as a steady
improvement in position, or a steady decline
While evaluating this data, bear in mind that the search engines
are constantly being tweaked. Google is believed to tweak and test its
algorithms every day. This can result in a lot of movement in rankings
on a regular basis, and this type of movement is usually meaningless
from an SEO perspective.
What follows are some examples of tools that allow you to obtain
rankings data. For one, you can get the data directly from Google
Webmaster Tools (see Figure 17).
Google handily shows the top 20 queries for which your site came
up, as well as the queries that were clicked on the most. This is nice
data to give you a snapshot of where things stand.
Enquisite
Optimizer provides some visibility into rankings data, as shown
in Figure 18.
Last but not least are the tools from Thumbshots. For example, the
Thumbshots rankings tool provides rankings data as well, but offers the
novel additional feature of enabling you to pull the rankings for two
sites at once, and get comparative data in a graphical form, as shown in
Figure 19.
Many other tools allow you to collect rankings data. Some of the
most important ones are:
Whatever tool you choose to use, or even if you do your checks
manually, remember to stay focused. Rankings move back and forth on a
regular basis due to changes in search engine algorithms. Focus on
changes of significance as we previously outlined, and use traffic and
conversion measurements for day-to-day measurement of progress.
5. Crawl Errors
Complex websites will ultimately develop errors. This will come
from moving pages where the publisher forgets to redirect the old page
to the new page; or the publisher makes a mistake in her robots.txt file and prevents the crawling of
key parts of her site. It can also happen that someone links to the
publisher’s site, but she implements the link incorrectly by linking to
a page that does not exist (perhaps as a result of a typo).
5.1. Tools from the search engines
All of these things are easy to diagnose in either Google
Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools. Figure 20 shows the Crawl Issues page in
Bing WMT.
You can see that Bing will provide data on 404 pages, pages
blocked by REP (which is short for Robots Exclusion Protocol), dynamic
URLs that might be troublesome for Bing, malware-infected pages, and
unsupported content types.
Google provides similar data, with some notable differences (see
Figure 21).
Notice the additional types of errors provided. In addition, if
you look at the 404 report in Google WMT, you have the option of
seeing what pages link to the page generating the 404 error, as shown
in Figure 22.
The great thing about the 404 reports in both tools is that you
can spot pages that have been implemented with the wrong URL on your
site, and you can spot whether someone links to one of your pages
using the wrong URL. In the latter case, 301-redirect
the page that received the bad link to the correct page, and pick up
an easy link. In short, 404 errors provide great opportunities to
request updated links from sites linking to old URLs.
5.2. Third-party tools to check for crawl errors
Some excellent third-party tools are available for seeing how a
search engine crawler will look at your site. One of these is SEO-Browser. Use this tool to
see how search engine crawlers look at your web pages. This can be
useful during a technical SEO evaluation of a site, or when debugging
site indexation problems. Figure 23 shows the
basic view from SEO-Browser for the TripAdvisor home
page.
Interestingly, this report indicates that the website shows that
the surfer used an unknown browser. It might be interesting to
determine why that is happening. If you look at the Amazon home page
using the Advanced mode, you can see some interesting data as well
(see Figure 24).
The Advanced view provides a wide range of stats above the view
of the web page itself. Down toward the bottom of Figure 24, you can see that Amazon offers a
screen reader version of the page.
Another excellent tool is the SEOmoz Crawl Test Tool. It
provides an extensive set of statistics on any website you choose to
check. Figure 25 shows a small sample
of the data provided.
The tool also provides a detailed look at some of the more
important pages on the site, including the indexing status in the
major search engines, the most important keywords, metadata, and the
number of internal links to the page.
Tools such as these that provide a crawler’s-eye view of your
web page or website can be effective in helping you to rapidly
diagnose problems with your site.
