Sometimes an importXML query in Google Docs immediately gives you the love.

Other times?  Not so much.

Having played with this a lot, let me first suggest changing the keyword just a bit.  Maybe change it from plural to singular (say, baseball card dealer instead of baseball card dealers), or try removing a term entirely, as with the example above where chicago electric power company delivers nothing, but chicago electric company works fine. I can’t tell you why the tool prefers one over the other, only that this has worked for me on occasion.  (NOTE: The above example is from the same spreadsheet, with both queries side by side, entered within seconds of each other.)

Also, a bit of advice: don’t abuse the functionality.  Look, the Google servers can detect when it’s getting too many requests from the same IP, and if it thinks anything automated is going on, it just revokes your privileges.  So I know it can be extremely convenient and fun to have a single Google spreadsheet with 20 or more XPATH strings delivering results for a list of keywords.  But don’t be surprised if, after opening that sheet, all other attempted importXML queries suddenly stop working.

Remember, this functionality is hardly perfect.  But it works quite well, especially since it’s free and all.

So we’re about to make another round of updates to the tool.  What would you like to see?  What do we need to add/fix?  Comment thread is open.

So recently I was engaging in some competitive analysis (as described on the FAQ page, I’m an SEO).  Specifically, I was looking for a quick and easy way to pull Google results into a spreadsheet.

After casting about for a bit, I ran across some posts by Tom Critchlow of Distilled, and others on SEO Gadget, about the wonderful world of Google Docs’ importXML feature.  Unbelievable.  What better way to look at results across a keyword set to get a sense of the lay of the land?  I’ve never done drugs, but I swear it was the SEO version of crack cocaine. [Read more...]