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Wednesday, March 03, 2010
How 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.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google's SEO Report Card provides product teams with ideas to improve their products' pages using simple and accepted SEO optimizations."],["These optimizations are intended to improve search engine understanding and user experience."],["The report card examined 100 Google product pages across 12 optimization categories."],["Google encourages other companies and webmasters to utilize the report and provide feedback."],["Google's SEO Starter Guide is recommended for those looking to conduct their own SEO tune-up."]]],["Google's SEO Report Card assessed 100 product pages across a dozen optimization categories, aiming to improve search engine understanding and user experience. Key actions included fixing broken links, simplifying URLs, and improving page titles. The project sought to provide Google teams with optimization ideas and share lessons with other webmasters. Many teams have already taken or are planning to take action. The report card is public. Future versions will examine deeper product pages and international ones.\n"]]
