A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.
The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.
Am I supposed to care that the poor SEO assholes that need to get their ads more visibility weren’t being given all the instructions on how to do that by the search engine?
Most of this article is SEO “experts” complaining that some of the guidelines they were given didn’t match what’s in the internal documents.
Google is shit, but SEO is a cancer too. I can’t be too bothered by Google jacking them around a bit.
No. You’re supposed to care that a company is pointlessly* lying, thus it’s extremely likely to deceive, mislead and lie when it gets some benefit out of it.
In other words: SEO arseholes can ligma, Google is lying to you and me too.
*I say “pointlessly” because not disclosing info would achieve practically the same result as lying.
Historically, Google had a give-and-take with SEO. You can’t make SEO companies go away, but you can curb the worst behavior. Google used to punish bad behavior with a poor listing, and you had to do some work to get it back into compliance and tell Google it’s fixed up.
It wasn’t ideal, but it functioned well enough.
The drive to make search more profitable over the past few years seems to have meant dropping this. SEO companies can get away with whatever. If they now have the whole manual, game over. Google of a decade ago might have done something about it. Google of today won’t bother.
Edit: If you’re going to downvote me, please take the time to explain why you think I’m wrong. Stop being the hive mind.
Tell me you don’t know shit about SEO without telling me you don’t know shit about SEO.
Just because there are people who do bad things doesn’t mean the industry is bad or have bad intentions. SEO isn’t ads. Advertorials can be a tactic of SEO, but it’s not SEO as a whole. Same with clickbait because it works, and I guarantee you also fall for it constantly.
SEO is about understanding what someone needs and creating an experience to ensure that someone finds the answer to what they need through content and/or a product to solve their needs.
This can be achieved through copywriting, researching search trends and queries, technical analysis of websites and how they render, providing guidance on helpful assets (photos, pdfs, videos, form, copy, etc), PR outreach because links are how people move around online or discover things, social planning because social media are a form of search engines, and more.
And finally, SEOs are not responsible for how Google treats shit. That’s Google who is responsible. Google is the one that tweaks the algorithm and doesn’t catch spammy shit. In fact many SEOs catch it and report it to Google’s reps, but they are the ones who can ensure the right team(s) fix the issue.
wait what is “social planning” and how is it different from conventional marketing on social media. That seems pretty far removed from search engines