Google’s Michael Jones Tells You How to SEO (Badly)

Google’s Chief Technology Advocate Michael Jones took some time out to speak with our friends over at smartCompany yesterday, giving them a quick 10-step guide on how to make your business Google-friendly.

While the guide could be helpful to small businesses looking at getting into search for the first time, there’s some glaring holes in Michael’s recommendations that we couldn’t help but poke at.

Michael’s first tip is to “create popular content”. Now creating high-quality, relevant and link-worthy content is a cornerstone of any good SEO campaign, but for Michael to claim that “the way you get ranked more highly is to have a genuine interest in other people” is a classic example of Google advising of how they wish things worked rather than how they do work.

Sure the residual effects of being more active in your niche can help rankings in certain situations, but regardless of how interested you are in other people, it’s not going to help you rank better. Michael’s example of a florist using new daily floristry tips on their site to get them better rankings is almost laughable. We’ve had florist clients before, the SERPs in floristry are brutal and won’t be swayed in the slightest by a couple extra blog tips.

Michael’s second nugget of wisdom was “Don’t bother so much about using keywords”, as Google’s getting better at understanding what you’re saying. Then he admits that “there are subtleties in websites that are hard for search engines to understand”. So to recap: don’t bother inserting relevant keywords into your content that helps people find what they’re searching for because Google has got you covered with imperfect semantic detection that doesn’t always get it right but sometimes might. Right…

Not bothering to incorporate keywords into your content based on how people are likely to be searching for it is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Google even provides a ‘content keywords’ tool in Webmaster Tools that shows you what keywords matter on your site. Leaving it in the hands of Google is a sure-fire way to stay off the first page.

Some of Michael’s other tips like optimising for speed, registering for Google+ Local, managing your online reputation and improving your user experience are great ideas for businesses, but the misinformation propagated in the other tips makes this a misstep in Google’s effort to win over more small businesses.

In the perfect world this is exactly how Google’s algorithms would work, but unfortunately they don’t. Google algorithms don’t reward you with rankings for having a genuine interest in other people and nor will they help you in any way for not bothering with keywords. For Google to pretend that they do is irresponsible to the businesses they are trying to help and damaging to the reputation of search as a viable marketing asset for businesses.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.