Comments on: Relevancy and Accuracy of Top Search Queries Tool in Google Webmaster Tools

By: Vanessa Fox

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:49:55 +0000

Sorry I’m so late in commenting; I only just saw this.

This blog post I wrote may provide more insight on why you don’t see queries for which you get more traffic:

Basically, the list is ordered based on the largest number of searches, not based on what sends the site the most traffic, but we are looking at ways to provide the query stats data in expanded ways as well.

By: Michael D Jensen

Michael D Jensen — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 05:39:32 +0000

Thanks Mark, I’ve spoken with several others since this write up and it seems to be accurate for many others. It would be interesting to watch it for a week and check every word that comes up for a ranking. I highly doubt we were ranked #7 for “SEO”, even in Italy, as we are still a fairly new site and are not getting any traffic through that query.

Thanks for your comments, nice to hear about your experience with this tool.

By: Mark Barrera

Mark Barrera — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 04:26:44 +0000

I have found it to be very accurate.

First, you have to remember that what you see is an average rank over the last 7 days, not the ranking at that moment.

Second, you didn’t mention if what you had selected for the search type (though I see you have all locations selected). It defaults to show all search types (image, web, directory, mobile, etc) and location (US, Canada, etc). If you didn’t specify web search then your analysis will be thrown off. Also, you would need to check your rankings on each different Google country domain that are listed in the your dropdown selection to know if you are ranked for that term. (You might not rank in the US but might in Italy!)