Why is Facebook still winning after all these years and able to overcome things like fake news debacles, while Twitter seemingly can’t seem to catch a break? I’m a digital marketer by trade (though more an entrepreneur than anything else these days) and always keep myself as up-to-date as possible with what it going on […]
I’m a believer in taking action. Too many people stand around and complain and point fingers. If we all did more and talked less, I think the world would be a better place. Recently, both Google and Facebook have come under fire for fake news – Facebook for spreading it and Google for ranking it. […]
On Tuesday Wil Reynolds published a post on SEOmoz entitled “How Google is Making Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO“. I enjoyed the read and Wil’s passion behind it (it’s one of the first posts in a while that I’ve read quite in-depth), and I don’t disagree with the principle behind his post, but I think the examples don’t match up and the post doesn’t convey what he set out to convey (sorry Wil). In fact, I disagree that Google is screwing us over and I don’t think their wording is telling us what Wil’s post is telling us it is. If anything, they are lying by omission by not talking about outreach, but we all know that outreach is necessary for content.
Instead, I think Google is dealing with a broken algorithm and are dealing with it in a different way. I do agree, though, that what Google says works isn’t always what works best, but they do not deny that anchor text works. In fact, they know spam is a problem. Why else would they have a spam report? However:
I personally think Google is moving in the right direction and actually dealing with this issue in a way that will fix the problem, not require them to keep fixing a broken algorithmic problem that will always have holes for people to exploit.
I’m going to break this post into a few sections. First, talking about “good SEO”, because I find the discussion worthwhile. Then, let’s talk about deserving to rank, if you should decide it is necessary for you to rank. Finally, I’ll show some examples that will hopefully give us some hope that Google is indeed fighting, and starting to win, this battle. Yes, we’re going to talk about Search Plus Your World (SPYW), which I am increasingly liking.
In case you were wondering, I have deliberately chosen to not respond to Wil’s post point by point. I am trying to get at the heart of the issue of what he was talking about, that Google is not doing anything to help out the good guys. I’m no Google fanboy, but I disagree.
This morning I was doing some searches for a client using some common websites and I saw this when searching for “Facebook Login”:
When you click this, IT TAKES YOU DIRECTLY TO FACEBOOK!
Read more about Google Showing Official Sites in Instant Search …
Google recently released and announced their “people widget” for Gmail. You can read about it here and here. *Notice* The two articles are identical, but Google is not using a cross-domain canonical. Google is creating duplicate content themselves by posting the same article on two different URLs! The Issue Google has released the same blog […]