Did the SEO Revolution wake up an engineer at Google? Seems like we did. After we started informing our members about the importance of decreasing the green line, in the Health|Index Status|Advanced section that very line has now disappeared from Webmaster Tools. So far, Google hasn’t posted anything about the removal of this line on their official blog, however, John Mueller stated, “was causing more confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites.”
Really? It was causing more confusion? Or did you freak out that you were giving webmasters solid information of what was causing penalties? You know, the type of information that would allow a webmaster to MAKE A BETTER SITE…which is what you keep pounding the podium about at every search conference. But I digress, at least you gave us the purple line (Removed) which is about as useful as the purple dinosaur.
Multiple forums have questions popping up about this disappearance. Alex, one of our members said, “Have they caught onto savvy SEO’s figuring out why sites are tanking and are now making it (even) more difficult for us?” It certainly seems to be the case. Why else would Google remove that piece of information? Fortunately we got most of our testing completed before the green line data disappeared. We learned what we had to do to make it drop, and we will share that with our members.
This move by Google is perfectly timed with their removal of keyword data; the newest version of Chrome forces searches to be in SSL. The result? Analytics displays “not provided” even more than it was before. It seems that SEOs are now forced to fly in the dark without gauges. We knew this day was coming…
Google continues to play an unfair game and forcing more and more companies into using AdWords.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.