Jill Whalen has been performing SEO since 1995, is the founder of HighRankings.com and a regular contributor to Search Engine Land. I suppose what I’m trying to say is “She knows her stuff”, but recently she re-posted an article on her blog that I have to disagree with - Revisited: The Art of SEO.
If you can’t be bothered reading Jill’s article, she basically says that Google doesn’t like SEOs and that by applying some of the more common search ranking techniques (such as putting keywords in H1 and Title tags for example) your site could potentially be flagged by Google as spam.
Now I agree that if you’re using black or even grey-hat SEO methods or if you go overboard with SEOing your site, then Google will eventually find out. Otherwise there’s no problem and Google does and will continue to reward sites that follow a lot of the basic principles mentioned in Jill’s article. Why? Because helping people quickly and easily identify the most important information on your site creates better usability.
Having good website content; an easy-to-follow, text-based navigation structure; good use of Title and Heading tags; a sitemap; etc. etc. All of these things could be considered SEO techniques, but really all they’re trying to do is make your website easier to use.
Now before I go on, I can hear some of the sceptics thinking - Google makes its money from their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, so for each site that ranks well in the free organic listings, that’s one less site that will purchase a sponsored ad.
The fact is, the only reason Google is able to sell advertising is because of the vast amount of traffic it attracts which is generated primarily through the organic listings. The other search engines such as Yahoo! and MSN need to run portals to help attract users - Google generates more traffic by doing nothing other than search.
So in my opinion we’re well liked by Google because we’re working with the search engine to improve the quality of pages indexed on the net and as a byproduct of this it continues to drive traffic to Google allowing them to sell advertising. Some SEOs even promote Google advertising.
Besides, if Google hated us they wouldn’t bother with such tools as Webmaster Central, provide countless official Google blogs or representatives like Matt Cutts who openly discusses SEO at conferences, on his own blog and many other industry specific blogs.
This is just my opinion and I could be wrong. If Google does hate SEOs, then it probably will hate this post too.
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