A couple of days ago, State of Search published an interview with four former Google employees. The discussion focused on recent myths about SEO and pay-per-click strategies.
These four former Google employees have a combined 20 years of experience in Google Search Quality. This makes them well qualified to answer difficult questions about search.
Over the past two weeks, they have traveled across Germany. They have also hosted several SEO workshops. Furthermore, these workshops have been held in both English and German.
The workshops cover several important SEO topics. These include search engine-friendly link-building strategies, technical on-page optimization, and penalty recovery.
They also discuss how to build online services. These services should solve real problems faced by users.
Below is how Fili Wiese, Kaspar Szymanski, Jonas Weber, and Ariel Lambrecht responded to a series of questions:
SEO Myth: Google, as an organization, dislikes SEO people?
Answer: Not at all. Good SEO work can help Google crawl, index, and serve your content more effectively. This also benefits search engine users.
Myth: High authority sites are free to try more shady optimization techniques; right or wrong?
Answer: Wrong. Based on our experience in Google Search Quality every site gets the same treatment.
Myth: Are there any differences in approach to fighting webspam across languages?
Answer: Google Search Quality Guidelines apply in the same way across all language markets. Having said that, there are different nuances in the spamming techniques applied across different geographic regions and the Webspam Fighting Team is capable of addressing these.
Myth: Google likes sites that constantly add fresh content?
Answer: Potentially, yet only if it’s high quality content. Quantity of fresh content is not as important as serving quality content.
Myth: Creating quality content takes too much time and is too expensive. Why should I invest in this?
Answer: Creating quality content may indeed take some effort. However, you should focus on your long-term strategy rather than short-term revenue. High quality content is an investment in the future. Great quality sources address the issues your users have. Often you may find that sharing expertise on specific problems can be enough to create quality content. Often the primary cost is to sit down and create a solution for a problem that users have been looking for.
Myth: Internal links anchor text; important or not?
Answer: Yes, internal linking is important. Moreover, it enhances users’ ability to navigate around the site. This is what you should optimise for.
Myth: Can AdSense ads ever hurt your rankings?
Answer: Overloading a site with commercial content like ads can have an impact on a site’s visibility in natural search engine results. This is not limited to any particular advertising system.
Myth: I see other websites using weird characters like ♥ ♫ ♣ in their meta descriptions, which in turn show in the search results snippets. Should I do the same to increase CTR?
Answer: This is a known technique to try to attract attention in the SERP’s. That said, ask yourself, would these characters help users to understand what your site is about? We tend to believe they would not.
Myth: However, big sites do not get preferential treatment when it comes to reconsideration requests.
Answer: No. The reality is that big websites often have well documented what they did and have often much more manpower to tackle the problem. As a result, a larger organisation can often resolve an issue more quickly. Furthermore, it may be able to apply for reconsideration sooner than a smaller organisation. If you need help with a reconsideration issue, you can go to the Google Webmaster Forums for free advice or hire a professional SEO expert.
Myth: Not linking to other websites (passing PageRank or not); is that a good practice or not?
Answer: Ask yourself, would you trust a scientific report without any citations to other scientific sources? Most likely not. We recommend to link out to sources you trust and are relevant to the content of your site. Therefore, when you are unsure about the trustworthiness of a source, or when a link is paid for or comes from user-generated content, apply the nofollow attribute to be on the safe side.
Myth: Being a customer of Google AdWords helps you with rankings in organic search.
Answer: The only answer to this is: No, No, No! This is one of the oldest myths. However, it is important to note that Google Search and other Google products, such as Google Ads, operate separately from each other. It is crucial for all of them to remain completely independent. Changing your AdWords budget will not have any effect on getting your site out of a penalty or change the algorithmic evaluation of your website.
Myth: There is cap of incoming natural search traffic per site, per day, right?
Answer: No. Google will display your site in the search results as often as it is relevant to search queries their users type in.
The biggest myth I think they put to rest is Pay Per Click helps with your organic rankings. Many people mistakenly believe that spending money on pay-per-click campaigns will improve their SEO rankings. According to the above transcript and the data that we have built over years of experience we have shown no correlation to PPC and SEO rankings.