Google: SEO is not spam So, “Is Google Trying To Kill SEO,” as the headline of the Entrepreneur article asks? Almost certainly not, as I’ll explain. But let’s start with Google’s official statement that it gave Search Engine Land on this: While we can’t comment on ongoing litigation, in general, Google supports and encourages SEO practices that are within our guidelines and don’t consider that spam. Got it? SEO — commonly accepted best practices — isn’t spam. And anyone encountering the newfangled term of “search engine manipulation” should view that, in my opinion, as meaning spam, not SEO. The “search engine manipulation” backstory How did the concern over what “search engine manipulation” means come about this week? It’s from a key document in the lawsuit, a statement by Brandon Falls, the Google search quality analyst who took action against the e-ventures sites. This Wall Street Journal article about the case links to his declaration. In that, Falls introduces the term “search engine manipulation” for the first time in my knowledge by anyone within Google’s search team. It’s not a term that’s regularly used by Google when dealing with publishers. There’s not a single help document for publishers that mentions the phrase in Google’s webmaster support area. From Falls’ declaration, the first reference to “search engine manipulation” is as follows: An important part of providing valuable search results to users is Google’s protection of the integrity of its search results from those who seek to manipulate them for their own gain. As noted, efforts to subvert or game the process by which search engines rank the relevance of websites are called “webspam” in the search industry. Such search engine manipulation harms what is most valuable to users about search: the quality (i.e., relevance) of our search results for users. Accordingly, Google considers search engine manipulation to be extremely serious and expends substantial resources to try to identify and eliminate it. These actions are critical to retain users’ trust in Google’s search results. I’ve bolded the key parts. Google opens by saying it tries to protect its search results from those who “seek to manipulate them for their own gain.” The problem with this is that this statement not only applies to SEO best practices that Google itself encourages, but also to activities that violate Google’s guidelines, which it considers spam. Anyone doing commonly accepted SEO is doing so in hopes of manipulating the search results for their own gain. Google’s own guide to SEO acknowledges this in talking about using its advice as a publisher in order to have “a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.” In short, Google actively encourages and instructs publishers how to “manipulate” its search results, and publishers are inherently doing this for their own gain. SEO is manipulation, and the Google declaration suggests that any “search engine manipulation” to be a potential cause for action. |