Google's SEO Report Card

[djbaxter]

Google's SEO Report Card
by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Google Search Quality Team
Tuesday, March 02, 2010 at 4:02 PM

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 (Adobe Acrobat PDF format) 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.

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Read what Google has to say about what needs improvement for one hundred of it's own pages and see how many of those improvements could be applied to your own pages.

Download Google's SEO Report Card here (Adobe Acrobat PDF format).