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.