Why Google Wants to Know About Small Websites That Aren't Ranking Well

Do you have a small website that isn’t performing as well in Google’s search results as you think it should? If so, you could have the opportunity to have someone on the Google webspam team look at it personally.

Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has asked small website owners to submit their site via a Google Docs form detailing why you think your website deserves to outrank the current websites in Google search results, and why you think your website is better than the ones that rank.

Google would like to hear feedback about small but high-quality websites that could do better in our search results. To be clear, we’re just collecting feedback at this point; for example, don’t expect this survey to affect any site’s ranking.

So what exactly is Google looking for website submissions? According to Cutts, one of his engineers “was looking for more concrete examples of small sites/mom-n-pop sites.”

He also said that they are looking for a wider range of examples than simply a group of engineers sitting around come up with, so they are “looking for feedback from a wider circle of folks so we can assess the scope of things” and “get input from a wider circle of folks.”

Cutts also revealed that it was a tech lead on his webspam team who was thinking of looking into the issue of small websites ranking, “but wanted more data. I offered to ask 4 data.”

So your website might not necessarily rank higher because of filling out the survey, but it seems like Google is at least starting to look at the problems where smaller websites are having a tougher time keeping against larger authoritative sites in the search results right now – something people have complained about since the Vince update.

Cutts said he has been looking personally into some of the submissions for small websites that have ranking issues. Meg Geddes, (a.k.a., @netmeg), who is well-known in online marketing circles, had back and forth tweets with Cutts that shows he is clearly looking at some the submissions.

Surprisingly, Cutts commented yesterday that they’d only received a couple hundred submissions, so it is definitely worth taking the time to submit your small website, if you think it’s not ranking as well as should.

This article was originally published on http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2291885/why-google-wants-to-know-about-small-websites-that-arent-ranking-well.