When Google says jump, it's hard not to jump. Often we take the words of Google representatives as edict and law, but it's important to understand subtleties and to allow for clarification with time. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses some angles to consider that will help you stay grounded when the "Big G" makes a statement about SEO.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about the public statements that Googlers make and how we, as marketers, as SEOs, should be interpreting and understanding those statements.
So I actually wrote down a few things that Googlers have said. These are quotes taken from websites that have quoted them. So they may not be perfect. For example, if you are someone from Google who actually made these statements, you might say, "That's not exactly how I phrased that." Well, it's how the websites quoted you. So Search Engine Roundtable and SEM Post and Search Engine Land, places like that, is where I got these quotes.
When something is missing
So for example, someone from Google says, "301, 302, 307, don't worry about it. Use whatever makes sense for you. They all pass PageRank." So you might have seen over the last few weeks there's been a lot of tweets and stories, blog posts written about how we no longer as SEOs have to worry about the type of 30x redirect that we put in place. If there are 302s, that's fine. Google seems to be passing PageRank through them.Well, there's actually been a bunch of discussion about this, because the evidence is on the totally other side, that if you have a website with a bunch of redirects that are not 301s, 302s, 307s, and you change them to 301s, which is the permanent redirect status code, it sure looks like Google organic search traffic sends more visits to those redirected pages or to the target of the redirected pages. Why would that be if it didn't matter in the first place? Is it just a bunch of correlation but not causation results because it looks way too consistent? Or is there something else going on here?
Many folks, for example, pointed to the fact that the word "PageRank" might be the operative thing here. In fact, this is one of the things that I would say personally. When Google says they all pass PageRank or they all pass the same amount of PageRank, remember PageRank is Google's original ranking formula from 1997 that Larry and Sergey developed in college. It is not a comprehensive, holistic representation of every possible signal that is in Google's ranking algorithm, 200 or 500+ of them. It's not everything that a machine learning system could possibly interpret. Maybe the machine learning systems that are in place at Google for spam or for relevancy or for importance, for trust, whatever they are have determined that 301s are in fact the better one to use or should be interpreted as a stronger signal. So you've got to be careful when reading a statement like this. It does generate a lot of discussion in our field, but it's not the only case. This has happened for a decade and a half now in the SEO world, where people from Google say things publicly.
When they don't get it right
For example, you might remember a couple years ago, "The mobile-friendly update will be bigger than Panda and Penguin combined." Then, of course, the mobile update rolled out — what was that, June of 2014 — and we all scratched out heads and went, "Gosh, that was not much of an update at all. It seems like things didn't shake up very much." Then Google sort of explained, "Well, a lot of websites did end up updating. Oh, I guess we had a more staggered update rollout of it than we were expecting, and so maybe you didn't see a lot of change." Well, certainly that seems awkward in comparison to that statement.
When we get clear-cut(ts) answers
Another statement, this statement I actually love. I love statements like this from Google. So this is when Eric Enge, from Stone Temple, was interviewing Matt Cutts and he asked Matt about whether a 301 redirect would lose some amount of relevancy or ranking ability when it was being moved over, whether there was any risk to moving a page. Matt replied, "I am not 100% sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I'll have to go and check." Then there was a note in the text that said, "Note in a follow-up email Matt confirmed there is some loss of PageRank through a 301." Well, PageRank or link ranking factors, whatever you want to call it.
That's great. This is, "I don't know, but I'll go check with the team that does know." Then a response of, "Yes, the thing that you assumed is in fact the case and I can confirm it." That's awesome. I love, love, love statements like this. I sort of wish we could nudge Google into doing more of that, of the hey, we ask a question and you go, "Well, I think it's this, but I'm going to go check with exactly that team that's responsible for writing the code that implements that piece, so that we can tell you an honest and complete answer." That's terrific.
When they're saying there's a chance
But then you might get statements like this one, which are real tough. "External links to other sites isn't specifically a ranking factor, but it can bring value to your content, and that in turn can be relevant for us in search. Whether or not they are followed doesn't really matter." That is a hard, hard statement to interpret. The first sentence says, "External links. We don't use them. They're not a ranking factor." The second sentence says, "But those links might bring value to your content, and that in turn can be relevant for us in search," which almost seems to contradict the first sentence. Those two things don't go together.
I think this statement was not from Garry. This is John Mueller I think said this one. "Whether or not they are followed doesn't really matter." Okay, so if you are using them, followed or not followed doesn't matter. Tough statement to interpret. I'm not sure what to take away from that. The only thing I think I might be able to do is to say, "I should probably test it. I should figure it out for myself."
Recommendations for analyzing and interpreting Google's words
In fact, I've got some recommendations for you when you are analyzing these words from Google, because it can be really tough to say, "How do I know which statements I can trust? Which one is the external links statement? Which one is the, 'I'll go check and I'll tell you which one is the flat-out wrong statement?' Which one is the, 'Well maybe this is right, but maybe it's just not telling me the whole story.'"
(A) Consider all the ways that the statement could be true while the surface-level info is technically wrong. So, for example, on the external links one, maybe the statement is true that it's not specifically used as a ranking factor or not separately used, but maybe it's used in concert with other signals. That's what was trying to be said there by John, and it just came out in a funny way that the language would be parsed on the surface as very misinterpreted. So if someone from Google says, "A does not equal C," you might say, "Aha, so that means B or D could equal C." There you go.
(B) Give statements some time to be amended or modified, at least a few weeks. For example, you'll remember that the statement about 301s, 302s, and 307s, there was a statement made by Gary from Google and Gary said this. Then just a couple weeks later, he amended the statement to say, "Oh, right, there are also canonicalization issues, which is separate maybe from ranking issues, but probably you don't care, because canonicalization will affect your rankings. 301s do help with canonicalization in Google, whereas 302s and 307s might not help as much," which is sort of saying, "Wait, so they are interpreted differently and there could be some reasons why when I change 302s to 301s rankings and traffic go up. Aha." That statement took a little while to come out, but it did kind of correct the record.
(C) I like data and I like experiments over opinions and public statements. So for example, a few months ago now, the folks at Reboot Online did a great study about external links. They created some fake words and built up a bunch of web pages. Some of the web pages did have external links on them. Some of them didn't. They saw that Google was extremely consistent in always ranking the ones that had external-pointing links that were followed versus external but not followed or no external links or internal links only, that kind of stuff. I think their results were pretty conclusive.
There are all sorts of reasons why this statement might have been wrong. Maybe when John said it, it was correct. Or maybe his second sentence is really the truth here and the first sentence is more, "Well, it's not its own separate, specific thing," and so the interpretation is what matters. In either case, that data, that experimentation, hugely valuable and important for us as an industry and I really like paying attention to those things and then trying to verify and replicate and apply on our own sites.
(D) The last thing I'll say is, look, we need to be empathetic and forgiving. A lot of Googlers are working in a giant, giant corporation, tens of thousands of employees at Google, hundreds of different teams that potentially contribute. Just the ones that we know of, there's Core Ranking folks, there's Web Spam folks, there's Crawling and Indexing folks, and Search Quality folks, and Webmaster Tools folks, and Webmaster Trends Analysts, and all these many different departments. It's not always the case that a Gary or a John or any of the representatives and Andre can go and talk to the engineers who wrote the code and have them pull that right up and say, "Aha, yes, this exactly is what's going on here and here's why and here's how we wrote it." You just don't get that level of clarity and sophistication.
So they have to operate with the knowledge that they have and with the information that they are being told. We, likewise, need to give them some room to amend their statements. We need to follow up ourselves with our own data, and we need to be careful about how we interpret and parse the sentences and phrasing that they give us.
All right, everyone, look forward to your comments and your thoughts about things Google has said over the years, how they've been helpful to you, potentially harmful to you, and hopefully we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
My question for y'all after seeing this week's Whiteboard Friday: What's your favorite (or least favorite) public statement from Google that ended up causing you trouble?
I think for me, the denials in 2014 and 2015 about using query and click data in search were particularly frustrating (but also sort of delightful, b/c then I got to spend time proving that they did impact rankings). It was a relief when Googlers finally came out this year publicly noting their use of searcher behavior data more honestly (though we still don't know exactly how, when, and for what, and the experiments showed it can be inconsistent).
"Let us figure it out" + "Just write great content". That's my all-time favorite pair.
Probably their recommendation that every global enterprise implement HREFLANG for the purpose of cleaning up results in regional SERPs and the subsequent statement from John Mueller (a couple of years later) that links are still more relevant in that regard. Huge enterprises went to great lengths and expense to implement HREFLANG, only to see their US pages still outranking their CA pages in Google CA, or their UK pages in Google UK. etc.
Already a good list but I would add to this the sub-domain versus sub-directories statements on how it doesn't matter. They've danced around that topic and the overall domain crowding for years.
I miss the days when Google answered every SEO question with "great content," because it was such a fun gag to run with.
"Should there be a trailing slash on my home page's url?" - "Well it depends. Do you have great content?"
"My average time spent downloading a page is up to 750ms. Is that an issue?" - "Well, do you have great content?"
Totally agree with this. Yes we should try to produce the best content we know that. But there are other technical and link-based elements that could help us with our problems today if they were better identified!
Here are a few of my favorites:
For me the most hilarious one till date was: how authorship images and authorship verification had benefits, yet removing them latter made no difference.
They seem to manipulate their own theorems or create a corollary for every theorem they proposed sometime back.
Another one: Sites without links might also rank well in Google SERP. How about this one?
I'll go with everyone in the comments: "Just write great content." and the infamous "You don't get penalized by this and that..." but it affects your rank in reality. Google, the greatest joker of all time.
lol
Rand,
Thanks for putting this one together. I think you've done an excellent job communicating how we, as an industry, would best be served in processing what comes from Google reps. It's a keeper for me to send clients to when they get lost in the "Google says" vortex. Greatly appreciate it!
Thanks Alan! That was exactly my goal with this. I feel like lots of us in the SEO world are constantly repeating this type of advice to those who've just heard "X" from Google and now think it's the only or most important thing they need to think about.
YES. This is so great: "Data > Statements and Opinions."
I just run tests myself. data is better than anything a PR spokesperson says. (a) it's not google's job to tell you exactly how their search algos work (b) the PR spokespersons don't know all the details of how this thing works - it's not like they built any of this stuff and the current SEO PR team are all low ranking people in the organization (c) things change (d) stuff is often omitted. (e) they often get stuff wrong, etc. i'm blown away how some SEOs rely on words from a PR spokesperson rather than doing their own homework.
Thanks Rand, another great session of White Board Friday.
There is no doubt that Google doesn't disclose the exact ranking factors and also many of their statement haven't matched the ground reality as such.
We had a client who didn't have mobile friendly website, they were skeptic to make any changes on their website as their site was doing fine with SEO and PPC. I had to offer a great discount and take full responsibility (SEO , PPC, web design) to make them agree for mobile friendly code update. The site was update in June 2016, after the mobile friendly update 2 was released in May 2016, they were getting mobile traffic earlier and despite the update the traffic didn't drop in May-Jun 2016. After the mobile friendly code update, nothing has changed as such, the search traffic remain the same, the only impact that it had for us was that the session time for mobile / tablet devices has increased.
I seriously doubt any statement released or given by Googlers, I go and verify their statement against live data and most of the times I have found their statements don't match with ground reality.
Regards,
Vijay
My favorite is always the last.it was from a googler, a joke.I do not rank for my name on page one maybe I should gez that https-ranking Boost,or i should make the page suck less.
If someone with a mothertounge wich is not english speaks in English he could be missunderstood.
Btw commentimg sucks on my mobile maybe a bug?
I definitely agree that you have to take things that are said with a grain of salt. It's a huge company with a lot of moving parts so I'm sure misinformation is easy to come by. I like what you said about how Matt handled questions that he wasn't 100% sure of. It's definitely better to not give an answer with a later follow-up than giving false information.
The whole Penguin debacle has definitely been frustrating. I do know that Gary has been avoiding talking about Penguin and saying that he has an idea of when it will be ready but won't say so that he doesn't give false information, which I appreciate. I also agree with the "clicks not counting for rankings" statement was a bit strange.
Always test and then implement. Never jump as soon as you hear something because there might be some semantic details missing from the initial statement.
The SEO community seems to hang on every word from Google, as if they are suddenly going to give away the keys to the algorithm. They just aren't.
Matt Cutts had almost rock star status as the great oracle of Google, in the ancient Greek context.
In reality, I think he was being used as a tool to influence the SEO community.
From your example, I think we were being manipulated when whomever at Google said "The mobile-friendly update will be bigger than Panda and Penguin combined." They wanted rapid migration to RWD and what better way than to scare the hell out of us.
Your advice about giving it time and testing is spot on.
"In reality, I think he was being used as a tool to influence the SEO community."
Agree with this - if you look at how Matt explained his own role at Google in a recent Quora post, it shows that he kind of just transitioned into this communications role because he responded to so many community questions.
He did a better job at it than anyone else, but he was also somewhat of a PR person. The PR person's job is to shape the conversation to meet the company's goals. Being transparent where it makes sense for the business, and opaque when the time calls for it.
MOST people think that Google LIES... but they don't. They just make statements that are true but extremely misleading. Like you pointed out, saying something "passes pagerank" doesn't necessarily mean that it passes authority, trust and all the other factors that Google looks for when evaluating a site.
The most misleading claim EVER was when they said: "We don't use Google Analytics data to measure a site performance."
Yeah! No shit you don't... but you use INTERNAL metrics (verified by other means, such as CTR, bounce back to the search and so on) to measure a site's performance. So while they made it seem as if they don't care about things such as bounce and time on site, they were secretly using all that information to beat sites down with panda and other penalties.
My mastermind group helped me save my ecommerce store when that happened, and since I have been focused on the metrics, I've stayed ahead of the curve (and competition, those bastards.)
Many Googlers have said too many times that they don't use social signals (i.e.facebook likes, shares & twitter likes and retweets) as ranking factors.
Then I remember a question came in Q&A between Gary Illyes and Danny Sullivan.
Danny asked "How do know “what quality content is?”.
Gary said "It bothers me because it is so obvious. Something that satisfies users' information need, that is quality. If people like, share, link your content – that is quality content."
And Danny said "If you are trying to find a proxy for quality, if a lot of people are sharing your content, then that’s a good indicator."
How to interpret this one? Same as last statement in above Whiteboard? It may not be a direct signal but you know what I mean. :)
Thanks for the interesting topic Rand.
This makes me think of a typical situation when thinking of religion: priests are not God! The comparison may not be 100% adecuate, but I hope the point is made.
If a statement does not match reality I think it could be due to:
1- Intentional case: Google may expect a reaction from people by saying something that may not match 100% with their plans....
2- Change of plans. So the statement matched the plan but the plan changed... and then we go into the Why?
3- "The priest is not God" and this leads to many possible reasons why the statement did not match the plan
The problem is all these can only be identified (and not even) after something has been implemented, and the announcement may generate lots of questions, and probably actions to profit or avoid from what the annoucement may bring.... and if a time and money investment is made for nothing then it is when it can be painful
Yeah - I think there's a big challenge because Google carries this great authority and anyone working there is believed to have omnipotent, perfect knowledge. That's not really fair to them, and it's certainly not 100% accurate either. Hence, it pays to be skeptical, and to have empathy for the complex, non-nefarious reasons that Google's reps might say things that aren't wholly accurate or don't encompass all the nuances that SEOs need to consider.
Totally agree with the way you express it
Thanks for putting this video! It will prove to be super useful to express how we often feel in front of colleagues/clients/partners who believe Google's statements are the holy grail. Which often leads to nefarious SEO strategies without going through a thoughtful interpretation and testing of what it may cause!
I agree with what you claim . Many of my contacts tienene to Google as the Bible and do not know this community actualizáis SEO knowledge regularly . Thanks to this community, every time I learn more about this matter.
Great post, always enjoying your videos.
If the statement doesn't make sense - ignore it
If the statement sounds to good to be true - ignore it
If it sounds right and the data looks good - do a test yourself on a website that won't hit your profits.
Don't let the SEO weather stations distract you - that might be their aim in the first place, to succeed at SEO world domination.
Hi Rand!!
Thank you very much for the post. It may be useful to know what to do and how to interpret the changes looming Google
The truth is that we depend more than we would like Google updates ... And if we add that we can interpret what quire say ...
Good weekend
With Google updates and changes, I really like watching the "weather stations" of the SEO world, like https://algoroo.com/, https://mozcast.com/, etc. It's also, of course, most valuable to be doing your own rank tracking at scale so you can see how any given change directly affects the keywords you care about and your site/your competitors.
I find all statements regarding new AMP, confusing. On one hand, of course Google will rank that pages higher, but on the other hand they made something where you can't implement tons of SEO elements. Will see, as you say we have to experiemnt, test and learn by experience.
A great interpretation Rand.
I'll throw out on the 30x issue that I'm a fan of testing. John Mueller said it a couple times last year and it didn't fit with my experience, so I tested. Even a test run December 2015-March 2016 showed clear results that rankings fell with 302s and came back with 301s. When Gary said this a little over a month ago, I started the same test that day. It's been a month now and I've seen no noticeable difference. Even with some older domains and pages starting to show in Google SERPs (the canonicalization issue Gary Illyes mentioned I'm sure), rankings didn't change this time. I've run a few experiments just to see what shows up in the links report in Google Search Console and it's definitely counting links through various chains, status codes, and even types of redirects that would have caused them not to show previously. My next step is to remove the redirects and see what happens, even though I expect some bad things.
Not everything that you are told is true.. And this counts even for Google.
Good point Rand, about data and testing statements over blindly believing them.
Hi Rand,
Thank you.
I suppose that the uncertainty in statements/infos of Google is a need for them to understand reactions from webmasters to implement new policies for their search algorithm.
In fact, they have several aims for this:
1- They have to apply/develop fair ranking policies for their spiders to award better content web sites
2- They have to serve (pioneer of this) cleaner/ well organized web environment to search among really valuable data
3- They are a team of limited number of people for developing better search algorithms. But there are millions of webmasters following and applying their statements in web environment. They have to check their reactions.
4- Some of uncertain indications may be issued for testing a part of algorithm which have to be applied in larger scale before coming into a concrete statement.
The main question is who will think like other as time passes? We (human being) like machines or machines like human being?
I think Google also aims second.
What shall we do is, to stick on concrete statements of Google first. Then to act as naturally as possible with valuable content.
Of course some uncertain info can be applied and tested to inspect ranking of our web pages. But radical changes seem quite risky with this kind of data as I understand from your post this week.
Hi Rand,
Nice Whiteboard Friday. As always :)
This is why you get these so called SEO-experts who will say: "302s are fine. Google said so!". Do you have any advice how to respond to this? I mean, if Google said so, why would they believe me?
I think the best response is to point to Google's previous public statements that, over time, have been amended. For example, the 302 comment was now amended to note that they may not be as respected for canonicalizing pages (which, IMO, is clear evidence they don't pass all the ranking signals a 301 does). Those changes over time show that Google's statements evolve, and that they're sometimes misinterpreted or initially misstated.
Hopefully, these prior examples can help when a conversation like that comes up.
Another very interesting wbf Rand,
What i take away most from this one wbf is that you shouldn't just mindlessly take everything what you're told as truth. Even if that person is an authority on the subject like Googles representatives are.
Another interesting thing you say is that even the persons who work at Google don't know everything about the algorithm. For an outsider like me that's a humbling thing to hear, but it also feels like a challenge to learn as much about it as i can!
That's all i wanted to say, I'm off trying to live up to that algorithm challenge.
Have a great weekend!
Hello Rand, This is one of the best Whiteboard Friday posts that I come across, sometimes it's been hard to interpret public statements by Googlers and sometimes it does confuse to SEOs as one of the Googler said "301, 302, 307, don't worry about it. Use whatever makes sense for you. They all pass PageRank." so in this case, what would be the outcomes if one can implement 302 redirect instead 301 as both redirect have their own separate places to use., but I would add that interpret done by you is excellent, Keep up interpreting other google's public statement as well.
Thanks Bhushan! Interpreting Google's sometimes awkward, contradictory, or in-the-future-updated statements is certainly a challenge, but it also keeps the SEO world buzzing :-)
Yeah Rand its true.!
Waiting for John Mueller and Matt Cutts to comment this video. ;)
Don't hold your breath, but expect two contradictory statements.
I'm frustrated with their statements on https as a ranking signal and upcoming Penguin announcements. The transition to https didn't improve our rankings and in some cases we saw negative impact.
Super helpful, Rand. I'm always skeptical whenever Google says that something doesn't matter or doesn't make a difference. Even if they actually believed that and even if it wasn't all a big game of semantics, I figured there was a significant possibility that there could be some (unintended or even unknown) side effects of certain things within the infinite Google algorithm. The data seems to support this, too! Thanks for bringing it to light.
Thanks for the great Whiteboard Friday Rand.
301,302. and 307 has its own identity and this all pass the page rank. but 301 sends more organic visits to those redirected pages or to the target of the redirected pages.
Hi Rand,
My Google rule is, when in doubt, to remember that Google focuses on UX, talks a lot about good content and is reasonably consistent. Adhering to this when trying to work out what they mean, or are trying to achieve, then seems to work 80+% if the time.
It's a heuristic that is accurate enough when I have no evidence or words of wisdom from either Google or yourself.
Thanks for your repeated help and advice.
Stefan
beatifully expained about SEO
I have fun study more google public, thank you..
Great video Rand. The best advice I was ever given for business was 'Trust by Verify'. Just because Google says something I always verify with tests before I roll it out for all our clients. Heck - They say that links don't matter!
Can you please add Whiteboard Fridays to iTunes so that I can listen via my Podcast player? I want to listen to these, but I need to be able to access them easily via my phone when I am out, and a podcast player makes it so much easier (you can download them in advance and brows through them much easier and so on).
There's definitely a gap in the SEO market for a Google public statement translation/ interpretation service- Moz?!
Experimenting yourself is very important before you start believing the statements from Google.
Agreed, though I also like to follow the experiments of others in the search community, too. This article did a nice job of collecting a number from the past couple years.
Thank you for this amazing link! Data is awesome.
I've always wondered how it is that Google has this 200+ factor, ever changing, super complex, super secret algorithm and yet John Mueller can answer almost all of the questions thrown at him in the Webmaster hangouts. It's no wonder that most of his answers are usually vague and contradictory.
My favourite, Google doesn't hold a grudge against a site after it incurs and eradicates a penalty(algorithmic). Yeah sure John, we all believe you.
Thanks Rand,
I think, from last past 1-2 years (specially after Matt Cutts went on leave) there are many statements or piece of advice from Google, often leads to more questions, discussion, debate and many a time, a lot of confusion among SEO practitioners.
Specially statements from Gary & John in January 2016, about core algo or Panda/Penguin related update created a lot of trouble/confusion.
I read article on How SEO professionals should respond to Google updates & announcements, which says we should ask some basic questions i.e. Does a Google change/update affect us? Now? How will it affect us in future, if at all? Are there any opportunities for us from the change that is being mentioned? How can we maximise potential benefits? What is the cost of not doing any change? etc.
Recently, Google has made another announcement, about "intrusive interstitial" i.e. "to improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly".
What is your view on this?
What do you think, is there a likelihood of implementing these signals on desktop as well in the near future?
Some interstitials/pop-ups are especially designed for better UX, will these also get affected by this update?
You're totally right about the mobile-friendly update Rand - good call to mention that!
I've had some good results with adding relevant high-authority external links to my blog posts in the past. It was not until watching this whiteboard friday that I realized that some of my highest yielding traffic posts are so successful because of these external links. But, I do not always remember to add them when writing posts. Do you think it is a bad idea to go back and amend old posts and find relevant links to add to them? Or would that be a bad idea as they have already been indexed? Might be worth testing out, ey?!
I love all the White Board Friday posts. Does anyone know if there is a feedly or way to subscribe to White Board Friday ONLY, and not every single Moz post?
Great post rand!!
I loved the last statement you made, data gives more information than the assumptions & statements!!
Yes , 301 passed more link/page value than the 302 or 307. i checked this with an experiment run over months time, where 301 gave more traffic than a 302.!!
One of the things that gets me about the hubbub that surrounds a two line tweet, or a sentence in a hangout from a Google staffer, is the way that people seize on it with almost religious fervour.
In many cases it could be a simple misinterpretation of what they say yet it causes ripples in the crowd. I'm thinking 'Blessed are the Cheesemakers' at this point, for all you Monty Python fans.
Rand, you are spot on. We shouldn't dwell on every sentence that these people say, dissect them and try to find an inner truth and meaning. Let's stick to the big picture folks. All they are trying to do is to make sure that when you look for something on Google, you can find it. End of.
Many times, I think that the unique thing Google has told to us with no ambiguity and no double intention is to write great and appealing content. No matter how good is your web positioning strategies, without goog content, they won't last.
I don't think this just applies to Google and SEO, but in anything being reported in today's fast-paced, condensed digital news environment. Sometimes the desire to break the information first doesn't allow for quotes to be properly vetted or tested leaving people (and SEO) confused on how to interpret what's being presented.
Hey Rand,
Interesting WBF topic. I'll be honest - I think the SEO industry tends to panic and over-analyze every little thing that Google employees like John Mueller & Matt Cutts say. I sometimes see Twitter discussions / blog comments and laugh over some of the buffoonery. Whenever in doubt, I always first refer to Google's official documentation via the Webmaster Guidelines or Blog. I find things that are written by Google to be more accurate. Aside from that, I often rely on people I trust (like you) and my former colleague Mike King to take what Google says and pull out the bits and pieces that matter. Finally, like you said - Test, Measure, Experiment & Implement what actually works and drives results.
- Gaetano
I feel like it's important to note that Google doesn't like SEO, they would rather people pay to rank via adwords than game the system. Googles goal is to create a search engine that shows the highest quality content while also selling the top results. It's important to keep that in mind and then do not what Google wants but what has been proven to rank websites.
Brilliant topic. So to answer your question - I think the Matt Cutts' videos from the 2012/2013 era are still super helpful. Some of the info is a little outdated, but it helps us get inside the "mind" of Google and understand what they are shooting for - here's an example of some of them - https://www.google.com/search?q=matt+cutts+guest+blogging&oq=matt+cutts+guest+blogging&aqs=chrome..69i57.7694j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=matt+cutts+guest+blogging&tbm=vid
but i'm confused page rank still a ranking factor or not ?
Hi Rand,
Good WBF! My take-away is to not over-react, be patient and run some tests, communicate w/ other qualified individuals and develop your own opinion, then test that.
Test, Test, Test = Good SEO :D
KJr
Thank you for the information.
Great information, like always. Thank you...
I hate... and love Google :S
Your article has been nice, emeğinize health, I am applying for my web page SEO process. Thank you.