Why doesn’t Google release an SEO quality check up calculator?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from India. And the question is, why doesn’t Google release an SEO quality check up calculator? 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? Great question. So, yes and no. In some sense, we do want it to be easy to do SEO in the sense that we want to tell people about mechanical issues, like if they shoot themselves in the foot with a noindex, or if they’re doing really, really bad things, like block themselves out with robots.txe. And we have started to send a lot more notifications of our manual actions on web spam. So if we think that there is something wrong with their website to the point where we’re willing to take manual action, we pretty much do send a notification to, as far as I know, 99.9% of all those people at this point. So we do try to provide that. And if you think about what Webmaster Tools provides, we try to provide information to help regular webmasters, mom and pops, and ideally not help the people who are really, really trying to spam a lot. So information about how fast your site is, for example, that’s something where when you optimize for that, it’s not just good for Google, it’s also good for users. That’s a fantastic way to spend your time, and it really helps the user experience. Whereas if we were to just give an exact score– so back in the early days, Infoseek would actually let you submit a page, see immediately where it was ranking, 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, OK, 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 all the people who 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 they can do productive optimization, all that sort of stuff. So 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. 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.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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