Google’s recent request for SEOs to provide feedback on Webmaster Central and further new ideas Webmaster Tools generated some interesting insights into the tools failings.
The site stopped accepting new entries and votes on July 24th but they have left the results available for everyone to see. We decided to analyse the data to gain some insight into what SEOs are really looking for.
The most popular suggestions were those asking for additional information on inbound links. General user interface improvements were a close second. The other significant areas were feedback on penalties, sitemaps, crawling and indexing which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
There didn’t appear to be any obvious trends for votes against which were spread throughout and in rough proportion to the number of votes for.
Methodology
350 suggestions were submitted with a total of 15000 votes being cast.
118 of the submitted ideas and a resulting 448 votes were not directly relevant to Webmaster Tools and were removed.
The high volume of inappropriate submissions was expressed by one user with the following submission (which was also removed for obvious reasons).
When someone submits an idea for gmail, maps, analytics, adsense, adwords or any other nonsense in the Product Ideas for Webmaster Central everyone should flag it as inappropriate.
The remaining submissions were categorised manually into 28 different topics and the number of votes aggregated for each category. Each submission could be included within multiple categories.
on October 28, 2009 at 10:40 pm
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[...] our careful analysis of the user feedback survey some months ago, it was clear what features webmasters were really desperate [...]
on November 1, 2010 at 1:30 pm
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[...] It’s been over a year since Google conducted a survey asking webmaster which features they wanted the most. Our analysis of that survey showed that people were desperate for more information on backlinks. [...]