So while the SEO Spec Ops group have asked for a leave of absence to go off and give the Living TV’s Ibiza series producers a good Google slapping for their betrayal and total misrepresentation of our amazing home once again, we’re cracking on with the more serious business of SEO as usual.
One of the other things that caught our attention this week was the fact that a lot of people’s rank scanning software apparently all stopped working on Google at the tail end of last week.
Google have never made any secret of the fact that they disapprove of automated scanning, as is their right, because it’s their resources & bandwidth being used, so they can do what they want. However with software that accurately emulates human searchers, with pauses and gaps, and takes as long to run the reports as to do it by hand would anyway, we don’t feel there’s too much wrong with leaving a program to do the gritty work for us, after all that’s what computers were invented for, no?
What did irritate us immensely about this (more than the August tourist’s driving standards in Ibiza, and that’s pretty damn irritating, be assured) is not the fact that Google change things about and software stops working, this is their right, its their search engine, they can do what they want, but it’s the petty evangelising from certain “holier than thou” SEO Types about how rank scanning has no part in SEO anyway, and that we should all be focusing on traffic & conversions like they do, la la la.. <gag>
I mean duh, ..obviously..??!!
But these people feel that they are so clever or so advanced or whatever their problem is, that they are qualified to go and rant at others on Search Engine Land, with their blatent misapprehensions that they are superior because they don’t show clients their actual rankings anymore..
what’s the matter, ..get fed up of making excuses for the fact they went down again not up, for the 3rd week in a row? :) …Not confident enough in your abilities to risk showing the client a clear picture of what you did to their rankings week on week?
Which of these brainboxes is going to come on here and tell us that they “focused on other metrics, traffic, conversions etc” and improved all of these without first getting better rankings ? Ya whatever. That’s like saying “it’s not important how much I earn from my job, its the return on my investments that I make using my salary that matters.”
…ONE IS NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE FROM THE OTHER, EINSTEIN
It’s the chicken and egg scenario, very few people can improve both traffic and conversions (without paying for advertising) without first obtaining better rankings. ..duh!
And are you seriously trying to tell us you would just do a few manual searches for a phrase or two, and if they are not in the first 3 pages you’d just forget all about them and focus on your superior metrics again? LOL! no wonder you don’t dare run ranking reports to show your customers anymore and try to fudge the issue with less clear “metrics”
Anyway, that’s not the point of this post, this post is about why we do use rank scanning a fair bit, and how it mostly has nothing to do with showing customers ranking reports.
We do a lot of Google watching and it’s through this close observation of the keyword / SERP relationship in reaction to changes that we’ve come to develop a fairly finely honed sense of what each and every particular change we make to a site will do.
On a basic level, regular rank scanning has given us the ability to understand fairly accurately a site’s current state of optimisation, and it’s current SEO potential (ie with no further link power pointed at it) on a change by change basis, ie. - we change page titles, it will climb this much, we do this, that’s worth another 2 pages or places, rework this, another 5 places, and overall we can estimate, pretty accurately where it will end up when we’ve fully optimised it with the onsite work.
Rank scanning has also given us a good understanding of how Google reacts to things.
We’ve often termed this the “Google Bounce” it’s kind of like a Sinewave that reduces in amplification over time, a bit like how when you drop a rubber ball, it bounces high, falls, bounces again but a little lower, falls again etc, until it settles at it’s new position in the charts. We also know how long it does that for, and when we should expect it to settle, for each type of change made.
It also means that we don’t worry about how or where a site is ranking for a keyword after changes, until the point we know it should have stopped, and that from it’s high bounce point and it’s low bounce point, we can predict roughly where it will end up, within a matter of days, even though it wont usually end up there until some weeks down the line.
But most importantly we feel that close studying of keyword rankings over time, and in reaction to changes made onsite, also allows one to see the bigger picture much more clearly.
We know when something big is going down, (although not usually what of course, until Google come clean a bit later on) ..whether that be algo shifts, testing stuff, infrastructure upgrades etc etc, and for example the new “weekend index” which we had seen and long suspected for a while, but first saw someone else write about over on SEO Design Solutions (of course, where else? 
) ..on one of the most advanced posts we’ve read in a long time: Google’s weekend index
This was was only noticed on our part by the process of constant monitoring of keyword rankings on our own experimental sites, and seeing different, regular SERP pattern changes every Friday to Sunday/ Monday from the more usual Google flux.
So please, before anyone jumps to any further conclusions about the use of rank scanning software in SEO and as to it’s value in comparison to your much more advanced “traffic and conversion metrics” please wonder again, if its just possible some might actually be looking into things just a tad more deeply than you are.
..It would seem some have a fairly narrow minded view of what SEO should be..
Anyway rant over, SEO on the beach team over and out.
PS anyone with any further observations regarding Google’s different weekend index please do say Hi on the comments and let us know your thoughts.
Posted by: seoibiza
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