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Do you find the reports within Google Webmaster Tools to be accurate?
We ran a poll asking just that question a few months ago. We asked Do You Find Google Webmaster Tools To Be Accurate?
Only about 5% felt the reports were "extremely accurate" while 12% said the reports were "completely wrong"! Of course, like with most things, it is not black and white. 56% said it is "not so accurate" and when you add it with the 12%, you get 68% feeling the results are not all that accurate or completely not accurate.
Again, they may be accurate and this is all just perception. If so, only 25% say it is "accurate enough" and the 5% said it is very accurate, so 30% are confident in the reports within Google Webmaster Tools.
Why is there a lack of confidence in these reports?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
This post was written earlier and scheduled to be posted today.
Comments:
justindh
04/20/2011 02:08 pm
is there a good free alternative to Google Webmaster tools, that is more accurate, and hopefully free?
Chris Kirkham
04/20/2011 04:01 pm
I find it's more accurate than, say, Open Site Explorer, but I'm not going to say it's the best thing out there. I think when checking backlinks you should use a few of the free software options instead of just one, but I think that because all of them give me widely different results. I think WT is the best for checking crawl errors and html problems. But that's just me.
Kayden Kelly
04/20/2011 10:47 pm
It isn't about accuracy since the keyword data that these SEO's are probably referring to is most definitely sampled data. Thus, it is about trends and general insights. If you know what you are doing you know how to maximize the value without getting derailed by data accuracy. If the data was highly accurate it could be used for reverse engineering efforts and Google must be careful about this.
James Spacey
04/20/2011 10:47 pm
For me it's always been one tool to use in conjunction with others. Relying on only one source of information, whether it's for SEO or anything else is prone to cause strife.
rich_falconer
04/20/2011 11:46 pm
I think the data is decent enough but misinterpretation and/or comparison with analytics data often causes people to claim it's worse or less useful than it is.
Kennethbach
04/21/2011 09:00 am
I absolutely feel that the data could be better. They are simply not detailed enough for me.
dental impalnts
04/21/2011 11:27 am
Well it also depends..because most of the time.. i get data which i want.. :) and by most of the times it means.. i have few website for which i didnt get enuf data.. i have tweaks many things but nothing has worked out
SEO Company
04/21/2011 12:16 pm
The data could be better! Even the keywords search tool uses overly bloated numbers...
Doug Boisvert
04/21/2011 12:40 pm
I believe Google is the master of dis-information period. How many times have I watched a Matt Cutts video only to see sites doing everything he says not to do ranking No 1 or on the other side of the fence doing everything he says to do and not being found. Don't get me wrong their tools are essential but mix well with, common sense, experience, testing, monitoring and research. I don't blame them if they gave out all their businesses would not throw so much money at them. As objective as I'm trying to be this sounds a little cynical... huh?
Michael LaRocca
05/05/2011 11:37 am
I refudiate all things Google.
PC Support
01/13/2012 01:26 pm
I agree, very inaccurate. But what i find is that webmaster tools has a huge lag on it compared to search results which is expected. Google focuses their accuracy on their search algorithm which means its always crawling sites that rank well and updating its search results quickly if you are an important site. but the fact that the site improved rank for certain keywords doesnt get updated in WT till a few days later.
Alex Lanzetta
02/17/2012 11:24 am
I think it's terrible right now. The website preview picture keeps changing from a month ago to two months ago, and the query data changes every other week and usually goes to a number that doesn't correlate to the past numbers (Like going from 1300 clicks down to 1000) .
Popo93
04/17/2012 04:26 pm
It's just totally inaccurate. I have some sites that Google claims I have thousands of backlinks for (which I don't). And I have some sites with thousands of backlinks, and which rank in the top 5 results -- and WebMaster tools claims I only have a few dozen backlinks. Clearly, if the sites are ranking in the top 5, then Google's *actual* ranking algorithm is counting a greater number of backlinks than Webmaster Tools...