The job of an SEO has brought innovation in how online business make marketing strategies but remains at a controversial stand when it comes to major search engines, Google in particular.
There have been problems, debates and rebuttals for years now regarding how Google feels about search engine optimizers (SEOs) and has left people wondering – does Google really care?
It all depends on how you approach the question however. You could be asking whether Google cares enough about SEOs to make strategies for or against them or you could be asking if Google cares for and nurtures SEOs. The answer to the latter is a blatant no.
Google’s stance on SEO has been quite a negative one for a long time now. There are activities of some SEOs to blame however that have made Google generalize and deal with all SEO activity in the same manner. The people at Google realize too how important SEO is as a tool for marketing today but they don’t want to support it due to SEO turning black hat.
Recently, Google published a document on their website explaining the role of the SEO in the lives of users of the Web. It highlighted duties like writing copy, giving advice on website architecture and helping Web companies find good directories to link to their sites.
Those duties are but part of what SEO is all about and Google doesn’t want to have to do anything with any other functions of SEO.
The whole document also highlights how a few unethical SEOs have brought a bad name to the online marketing industry by manipulating searchengine results.
An SEO will argue though, that what Google thinks should be the functions of SEO are trivial and not what SEO is all about. What they call ‘manipulation’ is actually intelligent use of search engine results to gain feedback on online marketing strategies.
As Google also leaves out SEO copy writing in the document, it steers clear of showing any support for how SEO writing can help in increasing a website’s ranking in search results.
It is ethical SEO that Google should start turning their head towards and start caring about, which they don’t.
For instance, if there are 1000 pizza joints in New York, all having websites, searching for “Pizza joint New York” technically makes all of those 1000 joints relevant results. As Google only displays 10 results per page, what makes one website more relevant top come up in the top 10 is determined by Google’s algorithm.
If a pizza joint owner decides he wants his website to show up in the top 10, he approaches an SEO. There is nothing wrong with that but Google has been having a hard time calling it ethical.
To turn things in SEOs’ favor however, the actual unethical optimization like hidden links and spam words in websites’ pages will have to be brought to a minimum.
Whenever Google catches a website worked on by an unethical SEO using black hat techniques, it gives SEO an overall bad name.