What Google Thinks Of Your Site?
How Google views your site does matter if you want to succeed online because Google has become the dominant search engine on the web. It now has over 60% of the U.S. search engine market. In other countries around the world that percentage rises to 80% or more. In addition, the Google Brand Name has solidly permeated the popular psyche and any top rankings within Google will bring much weight and prestige along with all that traffic.
If you’re a webmaster, you will already know how vital Google is to the success of your site, especially if you rely upon organic keyword rankings for your traffic. This free organic traffic from Google is highly desired by webmasters because it is extremely targeted and delivers high conversion rates.
In trying to reach the highest rankings possible, I (like most webmasters) have to be constantly aware of what Google thinks of my site and content. As a webmaster and marketer I have always geared my online marketing towards Google. I have spent years building my keyword rankings within Google; if you take out the fact that it has nearly driven me insane, it has mostly been a positive experience.
This experience has also shown me it is indeed important for anyone to know how Google views and rates your site or content. The more knowledge you have, the better able you will be to tackle any obstacles and challenges that will come your way.
SERPs Is The Only Opinion That Counts
And like most webmasters, I try to find out as much about Google as is humanly possible, but Google doesn’t give up its secrets easily. In fact, many webmasters would argue the only true opinion Google has of your site is shown in their SERPs - if your keywords/pages are ranked in the number one spots in Google’s “Search Engine Results Pages” then Google must think your site or content deserves to be there.
However, there are other ways of finding out how Google is viewing your content. Below are several Google webmaster tools and things you can do to discover just how Google views your site or pages. They will give you a better picture of what Google thinks about your site.
Checking Your Content/Keywords In Google
One handy tool that will show you what Google thinks your pages consist of is located here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Just type in your URL and tick off website content and you will get a listing of the major keywords Google has for your content. If your targeted keyword or keywords are not listed, then you have to do some re-writing.
Checking Your Backlinks In Google
If you want to find out how many backlinks your site has in Google, just open up Google Search and type in:
link:yourURL
and it will show you the number of backlinks you have.
Since Google doesn’t give you all your existing backlinks, many webmaster also use Yahoo! to find a more exact number of links your site has on the web.
Just open Yahoo! and type in: linkdomain:yourURL
Now whether Google is using or considering all these backlinks is the big question? Finding the exact number of backlinks you have in Google has always been a problem because Google is not giving you the exact number or at least this is the general opinion of most SEO experts.
Another way I monitor my links in Google is to place quotation marks around my site name or my name “bizwaremagic” or “titus hoskins” and do a search in Google. This gives me the pages containing references to me or my site. This is usually 50,000 to 100,000 pages, I have also noticed my online income usually correlates as this number goes up or down.
Checking Your Indexed Pages In Google
Obviously, it is very important for you to know what content the search engines have indexed from your site. You can also check to see how your links are displayed and to see if any titles or descriptions are missing from your pages.
You can see how many of your pages are indexed in Google by using the site command.
Just type into Google Search:
site:yourURL
A little while back, having your pages indexed in Google’s Supplemental Index caused webmasters much stress as it seemed Google was judging these pages as “second class” pages. Since then, Google no longer uses the Supplementary Label in grading pages but that doesn’t mean a supplementary index doesn’t exist; just that Google has promised to crawl and consider these pages as well in any search query.
Checking Your Google Cache
You can also check to see the Google Cache of your site by using the cache command. You will also discover when it was last retrieved.
Just type into Google Search:
cache:yourURL
Checking Your PageRank Within Google
Another tricky issue is PageRank. This is supposed to be the heart of Google’s ranking system created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin; each link is considered a “vote” for your page and the higher the number of “votes” you have, the higher the PR your page receives. However, again Google is using “smoke and mirrors” to conceal your true PageRank mainly to cut out abuse and manipulation of their results. Some experts say PageRank still counts, other say it doesn’t.
You can check your Google PageRank here:
http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker
From my own experiences, I have received more traffic when my site was at PR4 than I received when it was at PR6. What’s important is getting high rankings for your targeted keywords… if you get top spots, it doesn’t matter if your main index page (site) is PR4 or PR6, you’re still get the same amount of traffic. In other words, don’t become too fixated on PageRank because Google in many cases is not letting you see the true PR of a webpage.
I would like to add one point to the whole PageRank issue and that has to do with perception. If you’re running an online business then having a PR8 site does matter for it will bring in more business and customers (especially if you’re in the SEO industry) mainly because of the “perceived value” of your site or business.
What Google thinks does matter!
In other words, what Google thinks of your site can play a major role in your success. Mainly because, like it or hate it, Google has become the supreme authority on the web and what they say, counts. Therefore, you should always be paying special attention to just what Google is saying about your site and acting upon that knowledge accordingly.
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