Google not very good at attracting search engines to its own Web pages

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Google released a report card on Tuesday analyzing how it optimizes its product pages for search engines, including its own. And the results aren’t pretty.

In the SEO Report Card prepared by three Google employees, the company received an ‘excellent’ rating in just one of the many criteria, three ‘satisfactory’ ratings and eight ‘need improvement.’ The report analyzes the main pages of 100 Google products.

The report card started making the rounds in Google’s offices last month, and ‘a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to,’ the search quality team that conducted the survey wrote on a company blog.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a booming Internet industry in the last decade as surfers became reliant on Google, Yahoo and up-and-comer Bing to find content. SEO consultants advise websites on how to code their pages with indicators that search crawlers look for.

We can’t help but chuckle when the company that operates the biggest search engine in the world fails to dress up its own pages to play nicely with its own search bots.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian