Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>> CUTTS: Ryan in Dearborn, Michigan asks, "Will Google ever offer through Google Webmaster
Tools or an API, a keyword ranking report similar to what WebPosition and various other
scrapers do? It seems like it would greatly cut down on bandwidth costs." It's a very
interesting question because on one hand, yes, it would. We don't like scrapers, they
can zoom the server resources that we want to set aside for real users. On the other
hand, we have a limited amount of engineering resources. And we really like new features
like Fetch as Googlebot, Malware Details, ignoring URL parameters. Those are important
to work on as well. One thing that's kind of nice is Google has--for some user agents,
so a still small percentage, but overtime I wouldn't be surprised if it would increase.
For some, AJAX search results, we will show when you click on the result, the slot, the
position number of that click. So if that's the case, you can just look at your server
logs and you could say, "Aha, for the query SEO, I rank fifth," and you can see by looking
at the URL parameter, "Aha, this click was on the fifth position." And if that's the
case, then, you don't need to go and scrape it all. So I think that can be a pretty useful
report. Certainly, the people on the Webmaster Tools team have included more and more details
over time. For example, there's a keyword details feature where if you say, "Oh, I rank
for the keyword SEO." You can click on that and you could see the top say, 10 different
pages on your site where you actually rank for or have the word, SEO quite a bit. So
there's more and more details over time. Right now, we don't have anything like an API, or
a WebMaster Tools that would do massive keyword ranking reports. But we do try to provide
more information over time because I know that people do request them.