In mid November of 2003, Google seriously revamped their ranking algorithm. As a result, many sites were dropped from their index, or fell dramatically in rank. This infuriated many Web site owners at the height of the holiday buying Google Snake season.
Since that time, many accusations have been thrown at Google as to the reasons why this happened. Some say it’s a plot to encourage people to buy Adwords listings. Others have even theorized WebPosition is somehow to blame. Still others cite more traditional Google Snake Game causes.
As soon as Google changed their algorithm, many WebPosition Gold customers whose sites had dropped contacted me demanding an explanation. They wanted to make sure their sites were not dropped because they had used WebPosition Gold. I reassured them that this was not the case. I went on to explain that many thousands of sites were dropped that don’t even use WebPosition Gold.
Many of our customers even saw their rank increase. In addition, most of the time the site had not actually been banned from the index. It had simply dropped in rank.
In this article, I will attempt to dispel many of the pervasive myths regarding WebPosition Gold and Google. I’ve used WebPosition for years on my own site and for clients. I’ve also helped provide technical support to others using the product. Therefore, I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and thereby feel uniquely qualified to address the most common questions that tend to come up:
1. Will running automated Reporter Missions on Google get my site banned?
No. Despite repeated rumors, when running a Reporter Mission, WebPosition Gold does not pass personal information, such as your name, address, email, Web site URL or domain name to Google. Instead, it conducts queries as a normal browser would, and then examines the results offline. With that in mind, Google cannot determine if you’re running a query relating to a specific domain. The only information that is passed to Google is your “IP” address. In most cases, your Web site’s IP address is different than the IP address of your ISP (Internet Service Provider). So, how can Google connect the two? Simply put, it can’t.
Google states on their FAQ page that they do not recommend automated queries to be run on their service because it utilizes server resources. Yet, most businesses find it impractical not to measure their search engine rankings at least occasionally. It’s also hardly reasonable to check ranking by hand in Internet Explorer, which for the same keyword list, would yield the same number of queries on Google anyway. Therefore, most businesses optimizing their Web sites find it impractical not to use some kind of automated tool to monitor their progress and to measure their visibility.
Working as a search engine marketer myself for many years, I’ve found that the best policy is to simply be sensitive to the needs of the search engines. Avoid being “abusive” in your practices, whether it is your optimization strategies, your submissions, or your rank management.
Therefore, when using WebPosition, I often recommend the following strategies:
1.Avoid excessive numbers of queries if you choose to check your rankings on Google. Most people do not have time to improve their rankings on hundreds of keywords. Therefore, there’s no need to rank check on hundreds of keywords if you don’t have the time to do anything about that many different rankings anyway. While your site won’t be banned from excessive queries, Google could block your IP address that you use to connect to Google, if it found your query volume to be excessive. This is true regardless of what tool you may use, even if it’s a browser.