How accurate is webmaster tools?

by Jacob Martus

Posted: 14 years ago 4 replies

Hi everyone. I have been looking my webmaster tools a lot more lately and I'm starting to think that most of the information there is pretty far off. For example, most of my keyword positions are saying like 4 or 5th when in reality they are 20 or 30th...

I know that the backlinks that wmt shows are just a sample...but I thought that keyword positions would be pretty accurate accross servers.

I guess the question I'm getting at, is how useful is webmaster tools, really? I know it shows page load errors, and faulty links on my website...but other than that it seems pretty useless.

Anyone else feel this way also?

#accurate #tools #webmaster

bgmacaw 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Jacob Martus

I guess the question I'm getting at, is how useful is webmaster tools, really?

It's very useful.... to Google.

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affiliated survivor 14 years ago

I use it to see what links on what article directories appear in the webmaster tools. So I know which directories are worth the effort. Also if you do blog commenting you can see all the blog links (or at least a lot of them) you´ve forgotten a long time ago and you can make new comments, Eventually for a new domain.
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- TargetedTrafficSolutions 14 years ago
  
  If you are referring to google webmaster tools vs bing / yahoo
  
  They are somewhat helpful.
  
  The links data is outdated and incomplete but does give you an overview of what is showing up.
  
  They tend to show a fair number of links into your site that are actually no followed, which therefore are not actually helping you with pr or value.
  
  The ranking section is very useful as long as you do not use it as a reference for ranking.
  
  Keyword Serp Ranking is fairly useless as a metric as every data center will show each user something else. You have to be able to normalize the data to use it for benchmarking and that is just the start.
  
  (This is a very broad topic and maybe I will try to explain it later in another thread, but your analytics will give you a much better idea of where how each keyword / serp ranking is performing.)
  
  What is useful is the % your site is actually appearing for the query and when it does show up the click through rate. It is also important to understand what index by by country and for which type ( Search, Images, Etc, )
  
  CTR is very important to your serps regardless of what they tell you and you better believe they track it.
  
  Time for you to start split testing your page titles and meta description to increase CTR
  
  Another very useful part from and SEO point of View ( And Yes I am One, and a Damn Good One )
  
  Is that is allows you to really seem where the internal page juice is flowing and where it is not. This alone can help you develop a far stronger internal linking strategy.
  
  Anyways you need to dig deeper into what the data really means, not the useless kindergarten view they just display.
  
  The way google looks at it is, if it is important to you, then you will figure it out, if not you wont and they will not reward you.
  
  Regards
  
  Marc
  
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  Jacob Martus 14 years ago
  
  Thanks for your response. Made a lot of sense. How should I judge where the most of my internal link juice is flowing? I think I have a pretty good linking structure...making use of YARPP. That seems to spread it out pretty well, but I am very interested in learning how to use the tools I have better, and get better results with them.
  
  I love analytics, and I know there is a wealth of information there, but I was a little skeptical about WMT. I was wondering how I could even affect the % of times my search term is showing up in searches...what factors go into that? I mean I've got some pretty decent ranking keywords...and ones that are converting pretty well, but some of them are only getting clickthroughs at like 5-10%.
  
  I feel a lot of the reason that they are getting such a low clickthrough is because right now they are in position 8 or 9...so they are getting impressions when people make a search...but not nearly as many people go down to the 8th or 9th result. My keywords that are holding steady in the 3rd 4th or 5th position get 75% clickthrough or higher. Is this a good analogy to make? The lower down page 1 you are...the lower CTR you're going to get?
  
  Anyway, thanks again for your insightful post and I'm very curious if anyone out there has a blueprint for how they use the information in WMT to its maximum potential.
  
  - Jacob
  
  Thanks
  
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