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Excellent explanation by Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts on the question Should I focus on clarity or jargon when writing content? comes from Ben Holland, Phoenix, AZ.
For technical details and scientific explanation, you write the best a few extra pages for the experts.
With too much content page is anyway no longer legible.
The landing page is for dummies, the underlying pages are the experts. So you have good content for everyone and everything can be
Found easily by both human visitors and the robots.
Clarity, but can also include jargon.
Matt explains that in most cases, having content that most people understand is way more important that having all the scientific and technical jargon about the topic you are covering. If you can't explain the topic to a novice, then the reader likely won't be able to understand your content.
Best case, start off explaining it in simple terms and get more technical as you go. But if you had to pick, it seems Matt is saying content clarity is more important over detailed technical and scientific content, in most cases. The short answer is focus on clarity over jargon.
It is a given that clarity is preferred over than jargon's for any content that is posted on the internet. In any case the experts who understand the jargon will not be using Google as source of their information. It is the novices that use Google to search for the information they need. If you want to talk to the experts, post your content in peer reviewed papers, if your audience is the common man, then post your content on the internet and write in the language your audience will understand.
Webmasters and Google have such a love-hate relationship when it comes to backlinks. Webmasters know they need great backlinks in order to rank well, and Google knows they need to keep on top of how to determine if a link is paid or not, so they can react accordingly.
Paid links are an incredibly gray area. What exactly is a paid link? How can Google figure out what is paid and what isn't? Google's Matt Cutts dove into the topic of paid links in his latest webmaster help video.
Now, 99% of the time, Matt Cutts said it is clear if a link is paid or not. It is a clear transaction that the link on a site was paid $X for. But sometimes it is not clear. Matt summarized it on Google+ these are the other criteria Google uses to determine if a link is considered paid or not. Google asks these questions when looking at a suspicious link:
What is the value of the gift, product, or service?
How close is the gift, product, or service to actual money?
Is it an outright gift or a loan?
Who is the intended audience?
Is the intent of the gift to get links?
Would the gift be a surprise to third party?
When Does a Gift to Your Site Become a Paid Link?
Google wants links to be created naturally. They want a link from one site to another to exist because the linking site thinks something on the linked-to site is of real value to the relevant audience viewing their page.
For that reason, Google outright bans any exchange of money in order to get a followed link from another site. But what about if you link to a site that sent you a gift (perhaps a sample product to review) or gave you some free service?
In a longer-than-usual Google Webmaster video, Google's +Matt Cutts explains the criteria by which Google determines whether a link was "paid for" by such gifts.
Incredibly Clear Paid Links
There are definitely a lot of cases where it is painfully obvious to trained SEOs when a link is paid, even when some webmasters think they are being pretty clever about it.
"The vast majority of the time things are incredibly clear: people are paying money outright for links based on PageRank, flowing the PageRank, trying to get high the rankings," Cutts said. "Ninety-nine percent of the time it's abundantly clear that these are links that are being bought and paid and sold and all that sort of stuff."
But then there's the gray area. What if someone isn't paying someone for a backlink, but instead the company takes them out and buy them pizza and beer in exchange for that link or story? Does it become paid then? Or where is that line? Cutts continues and tries to explain the differences.
1. Value of the Item
Is it swag you picked up a conference, such as a T-shirt or a pen? That likely isn't going to sway your opinion on what you write about the company.
But things range in value from cheap pens all the way up to things of high monetary value, and that's where evaluating paid links gets tricky. Cutts said:
Sometimes people might say something like, "Hey, I'd like to send you a gift card." You know what gift cards are pretty fundable you can convert them to money and back and forth... On the other hand, something like "I'm going to give you a free trial of perfume" or "I'm going to buy you a beer" or something like that, that's less of a connection.
But we do look at how close something is to actual money when we look at those kinds of things. If somebody goes and buys you a dinner and you write a blog post four months later, and the dinner wasn't some huge steak dinner with 18 courses ... that's probably not the sort of thing we worry about, as you would guess.
2. Loan vs. Gift
What about if an item is simply loaned for that review versus an outright gift?
"Another criterion we use is whether something is a gift or loan," Cutts said. "So imagine, for example, that somebody loaned out a car for someone to try out for a week versus giving them a car. There's a big difference there."
This is actually quite a common practice for loaning out high ticket items, because not many car bloggers, for example, would be able to afford to outright by all these cars every year to review, and car companies are looking for the publicity that goes along with reviews, not to mention the price of a new car would be worth so much more than a few paid links on a car blog or news site.
"If somebody's giving you a review copy, and you have to return it, that a relatively well-respected thing where people understand, 'OK I'm trying this out (I'm a gadget reviewer or whatever) and then see if I like this camera, but I do have to send it back.' Whereas if someone sends you a camera and said, 'you know what, keep it,' that's something that's much closer to material compensation in our opinion," Cutts said.
3. Intended Audience & Intent
Cutts said Google also looks at the intended audience, noting it can be hard to judge intent, "but bear in mind the vast majority of time the intent is crystal clear when someone is giving you actual money to buy links," he said.
Cutts gave the example of being given a free trial of a product. The intent generally isn't that they are going to be giving links in exchange for trial, but rather they are looking to make the sale after the trial is over and for then that person to tell other people about it.
"The difference would be where we've encountered people who are supposed to be reporters, who would say if you give us a laptop then we will write nice story about you, and it's giving me a laptop not borrowing a laptop," Cutts said.
4. Is it a Surprise or Expected?
Cutts next discussed whether it would be a surprise to learn that there was some compensation in some regard.
If you're a movie reviewer, it's not a surprise that somebody probably lets you into the theater and maybe you watch the movie for free. That's not something that's going to be a surprise. If it was a reporter for a tech blog and they said “give me a laptop and I get to keep it”, that would be a surprise, and it was for something not reviewing a laptop, it's “I'll write about your startup if you give me a laptop”.
Cutts also noted that they reserve the right to take action against other manipulative or abusive techniques trying to exploit people's trust that aren't explicitly against Google's guidelines.
He also suggests that webmasters review the FTC guidelines regarding compensation if they still are unclear whether something would be considered paid link due to the compensation.
While this clears up the issue surrounding at what point compensation goes from not being a paid link to being a link, there's still a lot of gray area in the middle, and it will come down to what Google can determine algorithmically or manually when it comes to evaluating what are paid links.
"Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file."
Percolator = Incremental indexing. Dremel = Like MySQL but for huge databases. Pregel = Solution to graph problems
I doubt this will help you with your SEO and rankings but hey it is always fun hearing an engineer talk about some really technical details about how certain things are used at Google.
Can you provide some insight into how Google uses Percolator, Dremel and Pregel? Blind Five Year Old, SF, CA
Matt starts off by letting everyone know that these are completely different tools. He then goes into some examples of how these programs are integrated into Google.
Percolator
Matt states that percolator, or Caffeine as it was known to the world outside of Google, is on top of Big Table. Percolator was the overall system that Google used to make sure that the whole system ran well. To explain what Percolator did Matt describes the way Google use to index content. He explained that Google indexed content in batches. In Matt’s metaphor, he compares this to a catching a train. Imagine everyone in line waiting for a train that only passes once a day. People fill up the train and everyone else in the line has to wait for the next train. Percolator took Google’s old batch indexing and turned it into incremental making it so that instead of having a thousand people waiting to leave on the daily train, people can leave as they come, let’s say, by getting into a taxi.
Dremel
Matt explains that Dremel lets you do great fast data analysis extraction over very large databases and lets you play and interact with them. Matt compares Dremel to MySQL as in they are both databases just that Dremel is huge! Cutts does say that there are some architectural differences but on a practical level what Dremel lets the people at Google do is take databases the size of the web and do very fast queries on over them.
Pregel
Matt describes Pregel as a system to deal with graph problems. It allows the people at Google to compute large graph problem as trying to calculate the reputation of your links or maybe connections between people and it does these computations very fast.
You can read more into the each of these from Research at Google here:
Percolator: Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications
Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets
Matt Cutts assures webmasters that the good guys will stand a chance as long as they don’t spam, and they continue to create compelling, unique content that users will want to link to. In Matt’s own words, he says that yes “the good guys do have a chance, and we [Google] try hard to make sure the good guys stand a chance”.
The fact of the matter is that Google is getting better at fighting spam. The “techniques” that are abused are being continuously minimized, and it’s becoming harder and harder to spam on Google. Google continues to preach the same values as always, make sure you have great user experience and come up with something compelling so that people want to link to you because of your fantastic website.
Matt expresses that, “yes it can take longer to build those links that are harder to get, but they are more likely to stand the test of time”. Make sure that you don’t start out by spamming or doing any black hat SEO tips and tricks because those techniques are going to be less likely to work going forward. Matt suggest putting the effort into getting those hard links and not on fast, easy, spammy black hat links.
What To Ask an SEO Company
Matt Cutts finishes the video by giving some suggestions of what someone should ask when hiring an SEO company. Matt’s suggestions are:
Do some research on the search engine optimization company.
Ask the SEO company exactly what they are going to do.
Matt also adds some warning signs you should look for in prospecting search engine optimization company’s answers. If you receive any of the following answers you should run away screaming:
The SEO company knows Matt Cutts personally.
They have a secret “in” with Google’s web spam team.
They don’t tell you what they are going to do in clear terms that make sense.
Their answers make you feel uneasy.
Being a victim of bad SEO strategies is not a laughing matter, it could result to penalties and loss in ranking that you spent a lot of time and money to gain. However, always keep in mind that Google is making it a small world for spammers to live in since they always see to it that offenders are being penalized. No matter what kind of black-hat techniques or other kind of inappropriate tricks some may use to rank higher, Google will always find a way to stop such wrong actions.
Just like what Cutts said in the video, yes, good guys do stand a chance to rank higher and the advice he left is the same as what he said in all the previous videos wherein the primary purpose of these website owners should always be to give great user experience. Make your webpage exciting by incorporating Social Media like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter and utilize the power of graphics and videos to liven up the page. Aside from these tools, coming up with compelling stories and interesting contents will surely let people link to your site in return. There is no need to use spammy links if you have great, unique and high-quality content. Google is always willing to help as long as one is also willing to follow and heed the guidelines.
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, answers a question about mobile sites in his latest Webmaster Help video where a user writes in to ask:
Is there a way to tell Google there is a mobile version of a page, so it can show the alternate page in mobile search results? Or similarly, that a page is responsive and the same URL works on mobile.
Matt prefaces his answer by saying when talking about mobile versions of sites he’s speaking exclusively in regards to smartphones.
As a site owner you want smartphone users to end up on the mobile version of your page, and desktop users to end up on the desktop version. There are a couple of ways to do that, as Matt goes on to explain.
Cutts qualifies his response and states that he is referring to smartphones when talking about mobile versions. Obviously, webmasters want users to go to the mobile or desktop versions of their sites as required.
According to Cutts, there are a couple of ways of achieving this. One is to use a responsive design which serves up the same site to mobile or PC users. The second way is to have two separate versions of the site which points users to either one.
As the video explains, if taking the second option, then it’s important to have a rel=”alternate” tag on the desktop which points to the mobile. This allows the Googlebots to understand that the two sites are connected. Conversely, he also advises to include a rel=”canonical” on the mobile site.
The first way is to use a responsive design, which serves the same site to mobile users and desktop users. Javascript and CSS scales the site to comfortably fit the resolution of the screen it’s being viewed on. It’s important not to block Javascript and CSS, because if Google can fetch the Javascript and CSS code they are able to determine whether or not the site is responsive.
The other way to go would be to have separate versions of the site for mobile and desktop users, with each having their own URL. If you go this route you’re going to want to put a rel=”alternate” on the desktop site that points to the mobile version. This lets Google know these two versions are related to each other.
In this case you’ll also want to put a rel=”canonical” on the mobile version pointing to the desktop version. This tells Googlebot even though the mobile version is on a separate URL the content is the same, and as such it should be lumped together with the desktop version.
As long as you have these bidirectional links, Google will be able to tell the difference between the sites and return the correct version to the user.
Yet another way to go would be to redirect any smartphone agents from the desktop version of the site to the mobile version. Googlebot can read and interpret this as well, so Matt reminds us it’s important not to block Googlebot mobile just as you shouldn’t block Javascript or CSS.
Here are three basic ways to handle mobile traffic.
Responsive web design - Webpages 'respond' to the user agents, and re-size and readjust automatically to best suit the user agent that requested a page.
Dynamic content serving - Less used, but useful technique similar to RWD. The type of user-agent is recognized, i.e. whether it is a mobile or a desktop agent, and then content is programatically.
Separate mobile site - Same content, but hosted on a separate domain or sub-domain. Usually m.website.com.
Following these best practices is the best way to let Google know about mobile and desktop versions of the same page. For more information Google has put together a comprehensive resource about smartphone-optimized websites in their Google Developers section.
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, answered a question about Google updates in his latest Webmaster Help video where a user simply wrote in to ask:
When will you stop changing things?
Matt says Google can’t stop doing this for a variety of reasons. The web is always changing, Matt explains. Since the web is always changing, the things Google thinks they need to do for users will always be changing. In addition, spammers and their techniques are always changing.
Google is always looking at new ways to try and rank results better. There will always be change going on in search results, so if you have a good search ranking right now Matt says to count on the fact that it’s going to adapt based on what users are looking for.
For example, if more users are performing spoken word searches or more conversational queries, Google has to figure out new ways to handle that. Matt says even if Google is doing a great job handling everything today, people will ask even harder questions tomorrow. Google has to be prepared for how search behavior may evolve in the future.
Google is going to continue to come up with new ways to better understand the overall intent behind a search. Matt says it’s a safe bet that things are going to keep changing for the foreseeable future. SEO in many ways is about change, Matt explains. The ability to evolve and adapt ensures better resources will be returned to Google users.
If you have been using the Internet and visiting websites for some time, you would notice that search engine like Google tend to produce different search results from time to time. This may not affect you if you are online just to read and get basic information. However, the ever-changing search results may affect the rankings of many companies who manage, own or maintain websites for their business. Many Internet marketing companies are asking when and if Google will stop changing their algorithm on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
In order get better SEO rankings, you should:
Follow Google Webmaster update closely. Always be updated with the latest changes of Google’s algorithm.
Practice the One Subject, One Page policy. This means that a page should not have more than one subject so as not to confuse the search engine.
Build strong SEO foundation: Quality content and Quality backlinks.
Have a question? Ask it in our Webmaster Help Forum:
Do a "Site:" on Google. Also search for domain. Try and find reputation. Look up on archive.org. Ask previous owner for WMT (Now Google Search Console) and Analytics data.
How can we check to see if a domain (bought from a registrar) was previously in trouble with Google? I recently bought, and unbeknownst to me the domain isn't being indexed and I've had to do a reconsideration request. How could I have prevented?
Matt Cutts gave a few tips on what to do, what steps to take, when researching a domain name buy.
(1) Do a site command and if no content is found, that can be a bad thing. Of course, if the domain name was never registered or is new or is parked, then it is likely no content will be found. But if it is buying someone else's domain name, then no content found is a red flag.
(2) Search for the domain name without the .com and see what people wrote about it. See if there are bad stories on it. See if someone went around and did a lot of spamming.
(3) Use archive.org to see the site before you owned it. Did it look spammy?
(4) Ask to see Google Webmaster Tools and look for messages and stats there.
(5) Ask to see Google Analytics or other analytics they may use.
Now if you do buy a domain name that has issues, then you can submit a reconsideration request. Matt Cutts said that before you do that, ask yourself why you bought the domain name. Was it for links and rankings or just because you like the domain name. If it was for links, typically those links will not help you. You may want to disavow all those links and go forward with the reconsideration request to start new.
If you figure out the domain you want to buy only to find it’s already taken, you may wonder, “What next?” Or you may have already found a domain listed for sale that you’d like to buy but want to make sure you’re avoiding any potential risks or setbacks with it
Here are 11 ways to research a domain you’re interested in buying:
See what is currently on the domain by entering it into your browser (be careful of spyware or virii). It may have a website, be redirected to a different website, have a parked page, have indication of being for sale, or have nothing at all.
See what used to be on the domain by checking it at Archive.org. You can find out if it had a bad history or if the current website on it is well-established or not.
Check who owns the domain, its creation date and other potentially useful information by searching on a whois lookup service like DomainTools. You may find the domain is well aged, which can provide an additional boost to your search engine rankings. Sometimes, the owner includes in their information that the domain is for sale.
Find out if the domain is publicly listed for sale by searching on major marketplaces such as Afternic, Sedo and GoDaddy Auctions. This may help give an indication of price before you contact the owner and/or allow you to buy the domain non-direct if you wish to remain private.
Determine potential trademark issues by searching for existing registered trademarks on the domain’s keywords in the US Trademark Electronic Search System and the ROMARIN International Trademark Database. If anything comes up and you are unsure if the domain would be safe to buy, contact a lawyer specializing in domain trademark law.
Search on Google for just the domain in quotes and see what discussions exist about the domain. This can help with determining that past use of the domain may have been a spam or scam site. If there is a website on the domain and no results show for it on the first page, Google may be penalizing it in their rankings.
See what other sites use the same name in a different extension by searching on Google for “site:domain.*” putting * in place of the domains extension. This may help assess whether the domain could potentially infringe upon another site’s common law trademark rights (always consult a lawyer specializing in domain trademark law if you are unsure).
Find out whether the domain is in any spam blacklist by using Blacklist.org. This is especially important if you intend to send emails out through the domain once you develop it.
(if looking for traffic) Check the domain’s traffic rankings and history on Alexa, Compete and Quantcast.
(if looking for SEO value) Check the domain’s page rank at PRChecker.info which also indicates whether it is “fake” or not.
(if looking for SEO value) Check the domain’s backlink profile at OpenSiteExplorer.org . You can see not only how many backlinks it has but the strength of them as well to confirm any SEO benefits it may give.
A question related to inbound links were answered by Matt Cutts who is Google’s head of search spam. With his latest webmaster help video a user have written a question to ask.
In general, in a situation like this Matt says you would have to consider the way search engines worked before they started using links as a ranking signal.
In a case like this, content would be judged based on the text on the page. Matt gives a simplified situation of how that would work:
The first word that’s seen on a page would be counted more compared to the other words on the page.
The second time a word is seen it would be counted “a little more, but not a ton more.”
Additional instances of the word would lead Google to believe the page is about that topic.
However, with that being said, it doesn’t help to keep repeating a keyword over and over. After a while that would be viewed as keyword stuffing and could negatively impact the ranking of that page.
Another way Google would judge the quality of a page without an abundance of inbound links is whether or not that page is sitting on a reputable domain.
Without links pointing to a page, Matt says there is still a good chance of that page being returned in the search results if it satisfies a somewhat obscure query. If you have one of the only pieces of content on the web with a rare phrase someone is searching for, Google will return that page because it’s relevant to what the user is looking for.
How does Google determine quality content if there aren’t a lot of links to a post?
Matt Cutts replied the way search engines worked before they started using links as a ranking signal and this should be considered in this situation.
In such case, based on the text which is on the page, the content should be judged. Matt even gave a simple explanation how this worked.
The other words on the page if we compare, the first word on the page would be counted.
Less but not more is followed when the second time the word has been counted.
Google believes with the additional instances and confirmed the page is about that topic.
Repeating same keyword number of times does not help the content at all. Later it leads to keyword stuffing and affect the ranking of the page.
Page with reputable domain, is another manner of judging the content quality without inbound links.
Matt Cutts says, if a page satisfies an obscure query then the page returned back to search results. With a rare phrase of search someone is searching in a piece of content, then Google will surely return back that content page to the search result if the page in relevant to the users search.
How Your Content Ranks
Cutts explains that the process by which Google judges content without many pages linking to it, is similar to how search engines worked in the days before SEO and link building: “You’re pretty much judging based on the text on the page at that point.”
Google has algorithms in place to recognize which keywords are being used (and their frequency) on any given webpage and will adjust the ranking for that keyword accordingly. The first few mentions of a keyword will put your page in the running, so to speak, but at a certain point repeating the same keyword can actually work against your page ranking if Google believes the site maybe guilty of “keyword stuffing.”
If the phrase being searched is unique in nature, pages with less reputation may still make it to the front page of Google’s results, “…If there’s no other pages on the web that have that particular phrase, even if there’s not that many links, then that page can be returned because we think it might be relevant, it might be topical to what the user is looking for.”
Not Just Keywords
Keywords aren’t the only factors in play though. Cutts mentions that the reputation of the domain also plays a role, but that quality content is the key to getting your page noticed.
If you have keywords that are more common and competitive, we recommend executing a link building strategy. By doing this, it will help state your authority to Google and help increase the chances of ranking.
Are you currently considering a content marketing and link building strategy? Contact us today and our experts can get started immediately.
The bottom line is that unless your content is extremely unique, you need inbound links to get it ranked.
Join us for a *Google Webmaster Central office hours hangout* :)
Add your questions to this event page, this session is open to anything webmaster related like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc.
Feel free to drop by - we welcome webmasters of all levels! If you would like to join this hangout live & in person, and haven't been able to get in recently, please leave a note here and we'll try to invite you a few minutes before we start.
Home › SEO Tips › One Page Two Or More Links Pointing To The Same URL
Two Links, Different Anchor Text, Same URL
Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Search Spam, answered a question about links in his Webmaster Help video where a user writes in to ask:
"What impact would two links on a page pointing to the same target, each using different anchor text, have on the flow of PageRank?"
PageRank Works The Same For Both Links
When a page is linked to twice from another page, it works like all outbound links when it comes to PageRank.
When one page has multiple outbound links, then the amount of PageRank being passed gets divided evenly among those links.
If two links go to the same page, then twice as much PageRank goes to that page.
Google Only Reads Anchor Text From One Link
If the two links each have different anchor text, then they are subject to Google’s link extraction process.
Google’s link extraction process works by identifying all the links on a page and extracting them, and then assigning the anchor text of those links to the documents they point to.
The link extraction process may select all the links or just a few of them, and that behavior changes over time (Last Checked in 2009).
If the same page was linked to twice then only one of those links would be extracted.
Focus On Your SEO Strategy (There Are More Important Things Than This)
Matt Cutt reiterates that there are higher priorities to worry about than this, such as making sure your homepage is drawing in users and you’re keeping those users engaged with good content.
In short "PageRank flows to each link individually as it would any other link on the page, at least according to the original PageRank document."
Use the internal link analyzer tool to analyze the links search engine spiders can detect on a specific page of your website. Search engines, spider links to index and determine the structure of a website and the relation between pages.
The link analyzer tool checks:
The Total number of links found on your page.
The number +percentage of external and Internal links.
(links pointing to subdomains are counted as internal links)
Anchor type (Text link / Image link / Mixed link).
The link type (Internal link / external link / subdomain).
The number +percentage of Duplicate links.
The number of links with an empty anchor.
The number of image links without an Alt tag.
The number of no-followed links.
Subdomains
The internal link analyzer is able to recognize subdomains and treads them as internal links. If a link points to a subdomain this will be visible under link type “subdomain”.
Watch the video from, Google’s web engineer, Matt Cutts regarding the use of subdomains.
Best practices internal links
Number of links:
Back in 2008, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) recommended limiting the number of links to a maximum of 100 links per page.
Since 2013 Matt Cutts explained having more then 100 links per page isn’t an issue, and this limitation is dropped from Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Duplicate links:
Try to limit the number of duplicate links. If you get a high percentage of duplicate links (>50%) you’re not spreading your link strength effectively.
Home › SEO Tips › Is SEO Considered Spam? Explained By Google
Matt Cutts - Head Of Goggle WebSpam Team discusses how SEOs help their clients, gives great examples and says some amazing things.
Does Google Consider SEO to be Spam?
Quotes:
“Search Engines or SE are not as smart as people yet.”
“Search Engine Optimization or SEO can be a valid way to help people find what they are looking for via search engines.”
“There are many other useful ways people can make the world better with SEO.”
Transcript of "Does Google Consider SEO to be Spam?" By Matt Cutts
I wanted to take a minute and talk a little bit about search engine optimization and spam, and answer the question “Does Google consider SEO to be spam?”
And the answer in “No. We don’t consider SEO to be spam.” Now a few really tech savvy people might get angry at that. So let me explain in a little more detail. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And essentially it just means trying to make sure that your pages are well represented within search engines. And there’s plenty...an enormous amount ...of white hat, great quality stuff that you can do as a search engine optimizer.
You can do things like making sure that your pages are crawlable. So you want them to be accessible. You want people to be able to find them just by clicking on links. And in the same way search engines can find them just by clicking on links.
You want to make sure that people use the right keywords. If you’re using industry jargon or lingo that not everybody else uses, then a good SEO can help you find out, oh, these are keywords that you should have been thinking about.
You can think about usability, and trying to make sure that the design of the site is good. That’s good for users and for search engines.
You can think about how to make your site faster. Not only does Google use site speed in our rankings as one of the many factors that we use in our search rankings. But if you can make your site run faster, that can also make it a much better experience.
So there are an enormous number of things that SEOs do, everything from helping out with the initial site architecture and deciding what your site should look like, and the url structure, and the templates, and all that sort of stuff, making sure that your site is crawlable, all the way down to helping optimize for your return on investment. So trying to figure out what are the ways that you are going to get the best bang for the buck, doing AB testing, trying to find out, OK, what is the copy that converts, all those kinds of things. There is nothing at all wrong with all of those white hat methods.
Now, are there some SEOs who go further than we would like? Sure. And are there some SEOs who actually try to employ black hat techniques, people that hack sites or that keyword stuff and just repeat things or that do sneaky things with redirects? Yeah, absolutely. But our goal is to make sure that we return the best possible search results we can. And a very wonderful way that search engine optimizers can help is by cooperating and trying to help search engines find pages better. So SEO is not spam. SEO can be enormously useful. SEO can also be abused and it can be overdone.
But it’s important to realise that we believe, in an ideal world, people wouldn’t have to worry about these issues. But search engines are not as smart as people yet. We’re working on it. We’re trying to figure out what people mean. We’re trying to figure out synonyms, and vocabulary, and stemming so that you don’t have to know exactly the right word to search for what you wanted to find. But until we get to that day, search engine optimization can be a valid way to help people find what they are looking for via search engines.
We provide webmaster guidelines on google.com/webmasters. There’s a free webmaster forum. There are free webmaster tools. There’s a ton of HTML documentation. So if you search for SEO starter guide, we’ve written a beginner guide where people can learn more about search engine optimization.
But just to be very clear, there are many, many valid ways that people can make the world better with SEO. It’s not the case that...sometimes you’ll hear SEOs are criminals. SEOs are snake oil salesmen. If you find a good person, someone that you can trust, someone that will tell you exactly what they’re doing, the sort of person where you get good references, or you’ve seen their work and it’s very helpful, and they’ll explain exactly what they’re doing, they can absolutely help your website. So I just wanted to dispel that misconception.
Some people think Google thinks all SEO is spam and that’s definitely not the case. There are a lot of great SEOs out there. And I hope you find a good one to help with your website.
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