There seems to be a general consensus among people who aren’t really familiar with the relationship between Google and SEO professionals that SEO is somehow cheating the system, that Google hates SEO, or that SEO is “evil”. On the contrary, white-hat SEO professionals and Google work well together in a symbiotic relationship of sorts. Google often divulges search engine ranking advice and updates publicly. Matt Cutts especially (the head of Google’s Webspam team) has a long history of elaborating on particular aspects of Google’s algorithm and how certain changes impact website rankings.
what white-hat seo does for google
Google’s job is to provide fresh, relevant, useful results to its users. White-hat SEO professionals recognise this and, by understanding Google’s goals and how it attempts to accomplish them, work with Google’s algorithms to improve their own clients’ search engine rankings. Therefore, improving their clients’ search engine rankings implores SEOs to generate fresh, relevant, useful content. This in turn improves the quality of Google’s results.
what google does for white-hat seo
Because white-hat SEO encourages the production of useful high quality content, Google is only too happy to assist by being transparent about how it ranks websites to an extent. They obviously can’t reveal every ranking factor or tell us about every change, but they do tend to be quite transparent on some topics. As an example, Matt Cutts goes into great detail to talk about PageRank sculpting, explain the inner workings of the “nofollow” attribute and how PageRank is passed when a nofollow is present on a page.
if google condemned white-hat seo
If Google suddenly started to condemn all SEO practices, not just those that manipulate the search results in misleading ways, white-hat SEOs would be more likely to cross the line into the more dodgy methods. By working with white-hat SEOs and even providing advice and insight into how Google ranks websites in search results, Google is encouraging fair practices and the production of non-spammy, high quality content online.
search without white-hat seo
White-hat SEO centers around two main activities:
- Making sure a website can actually be found by search engines and its content crawled easily
- Increasing the visibility of a website in organic search results by making sure a website keeps up with (and surpasses) its optimised competitors in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)
White-hat SEO should be thought of not as the practice of trying to “cheat” Google, but that of helping Google to find content relevant to the user’s query and helping businesses to make their content more easily found. If SEO did not exist, we would likely still have websites with extremely useful content organised and structured in ways that a search engine would never find. I still see websites with what would otherwise have been great content stuffed into an image. Good luck finding that super useful page now, buddy.
misconceptions about seo
On Lifehacker, a post recently appeared seemingly discouraging people from hiring SEO professionals and referring to SEO as “snakeoil”. I found this amusing, as the advice they gave to business owners and webmasters matches almost exactly some of the things that any white-hat SEO professional who knows what he/she is doing has been saying for years. In other words…they spoke out against SEO while making points that SEOs themselves have been making for years.
In conclusion, SEO isn’t evil any more than a knife is evil. It only becomes “good” or “evil” in the hands of the person using it.
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