Hall Of Famer Matt Cutts On Why Google Doesn’t Provide An SEO Quality Calculator

Google’s Matt Cutts, who on Friday, was inducted into the University of Kentucky’s Hall of Fame here in Lexington, has posted a new Webmaster Help video answering a question about why Google doesn’t provide some kind of “SEO quality calculator”. The exact question was:

Why doesn’t Google release an SEO quality check up calcualtor? This will help people to optimize their websites in the right direction. Is Google willing to do this or it just wants people to keep guessing what’s wrong with their websites?

He talks about how much Google does to provide Webmasters with help via Webmaster Tools and the notifications it sends out.

Then, he says, “If we were to just give an exact score…so back in the early days, InfoSeek would actually like let you submit a page, see immediately where it was ranking, and let you submit another page, and there are stories that have lasted since then about how people would just spend their entire day spamming InfoSeek, tweaking every single thing until they got exactly the right template that would work to rank number one. So we don’t want to encourage that kind of experimentation, and we know that if we give exact numbers and say, ‘Okay, this is how you’re ranking on this particular sort of algorithm or how you rank along this axis,’ people will try to spam that.”

“But what we do want to provide is a lot of really useful tools for people that are doing it themselves – mom and pops – people who are really interested and just want to dig into it – agencies who want to have more information so that they can do productive optimization – all that sort of stuff,” he continues.

“We don’t want to make it easy for the spammers, but we do want to make it as easy as possible for everybody else,” he adds. “There’s inherently a tension there, and we’re always trying to find the features that will help regular people while not just making it easy to spam Google.”

Of course, it’s getting harder to get on the front page of results on Google anyway, because of all of the other elements they’re adding to the SERPs and the reduced number of organic results appearing on an increasing number of them.

There are 8 Comments. Add Yours.

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paper cups machine
October 31, 2012 at 2:34 am

if google release the SEO checker, then that will more helpful to users

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Jane Moss
October 30, 2012 at 12:43 pm

I think there must have some ethical rules of doing optimization because no one can deny the important of online business so anything can happen anytime

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Rupert
October 27, 2012 at 5:03 am

Matt Cuts is a very clever person, he knows exactly what spammers can do if they will provide an SEO quality calculator.

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Andy Smith
October 25, 2012 at 8:04 am

Adwords has a quality score checker based on the landing page surely just make some ads and change the landing page based on the check!

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knysna
October 25, 2012 at 1:35 am

I tend to agree with the first part of your post but I disagree with the second part.

“The sum of it is that Google doesn’t want to give spammers anymore tools than they already have. Thats it, but in so doing that they tend to punish other clean webmasters too. Sad, but true”

Google are not punishing websites, the webmasters are punishing themselves by simply not following the ever so easy quality guidelines.

Needless to say, I’m sure if Google provided a SEO quality calculator webmaster would possibly misuse it, miss-interprete it and then wonder why the quality calculator doesn’t work. As it is they can’t follow the simple guidelines.

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Mike
October 24, 2012 at 7:17 pm

The sum of it is that Google doesn’t want to give spammers anymore tools than they already have. Thats it, but in so doing that they tend to punish other clean webmasters too. Sad, but true.

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LPG conversion
October 24, 2012 at 2:46 pm

This is 100% right said by the matt that it may be a tool for the spammers and it may create a great trouble for natural or ethical link builders.

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Nick Stamoulis
October 24, 2012 at 9:27 am

I can see how the quality calculator would be abused by site owners, even if they didn’t have a malicious intent behind it. And what do you do when you site gets an A+ in the quality calculator but you still aren’t ranking in the top 3? Imagine the kind of storm that would create!