Will Google offer ranking reports?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Ryan in Dearborn, Michigan asks, “Will Google ever offer through Google Webmaster Tools or an API, a keyword ranking report similar to what WebPosition and various other scrapers do? It seems like it would greatly cut down on bandwidth costs.” It’s a very interesting question because on one hand, yes, it would. We don’t like scrapers, they can zoom the server resources that we want to set aside for real users. On the other hand, we have a limited amount of engineering resources. And we really like new features like Fetch as Googlebot, Malware Details, ignoring URL parameters. Those are important to work on as well. One thing that’s kind of nice is Google has–for some user agents, so a still small percentage, but overtime I wouldn’t be surprised if it would increase. For some, AJAX search results, we will show when you click on the result, the slot, the position number of that click. So if that’s the case, you can just look at your server logs and you could say, “Aha, for the query SEO, I rank fifth,” and you can see by looking at the URL parameter, “Aha, this click was on the fifth position.” And if that’s the case, then, you don’t need to go and scrape it all. So I think that can be a pretty useful report. Certainly, the people on the Webmaster Tools team have included more and more details over time. For example, there’s a keyword details feature where if you say, “Oh, I rank for the keyword SEO.” You can click on that and you could see the top say, 10 different pages on your site where you actually rank for or have the word, SEO quite a bit. So there’s more and more details over time. Right now, we don’t have anything like an API, or a WebMaster Tools that would do massive keyword ranking reports. But we do try to provide more information over time because I know that people do request them.

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

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