Google admits its SEO could use a little work

Google has published a detailed, 49-page report that rates the search engine optimization (SEO) on its various properties including the Google search home page. The result? It's failing in a number of categories.

On the bright side, the company says it plans to use this information to better its own SEO, and that to help others, the company has shared some of the metrics it's used.

The report covers 100 of Google's products. The company is also planning a follow-up that will cover international localizations.

Among the items under scrutiny, one of the biggest areas of failure for the company is in "search result presentation," where the company scored a 33/100 or lower in three different categories, the lowest being "title tag format and length." This is how much information appears in the large, blue search result links as well as the text descriptions that appear below them. The report points at several ways to fix this, including the use of "descriptive words and phrases in your page's title tag."

Another low point of the report is the company's score on the destination sites where images of logos led. These are the Google product logos that tend to reside in the upper left hand corner of the screen. The report found that well over half of these simply linked somewhere they were not supposed to, including 404 pages. Google's solution, which is SEO friendly, is to use 301 redirects across the board; that way all the links go to the same place, and the search engine can re-index the page in the proper location.

Not all the report was bad though. Google scored well in offering a clear main page result (or only having one or two links that lead to the main product page), as well as having proper use of headline tags and internal anchor text.

Below I've embedded the report through Scribd. Users can also download the full 1.6MB PDF here.