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Hi.
I wanted to take a minute and talk a little bit about search
engine optimization and spam, and answer the question does
Google consider SEO to be spam?
And the answer is no.
We don't consider SEO to be spam.
Now a few really tech savvy people might
get angry at that.
So let me explain in a little more detail.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
And essentially it just means trying to make sure that your
pages are well represented within search engines.
And there's plenty--
an enormous amount-- of white hat, great quality stuff that
you can do as a search engine optimizer.
You can do things like making sure that
your pages are crawlable.
So you want them to be accessible.
You want people to be able to find them just
by clicking on links.
And in the same way, search engines can find them just by
clicking on links.
You want to make sure that people use
the right key words.
If you're using industry jargon or lingo that not
everybody else uses, then a good SEO can help you find
out, oh, these are key words that you should have been
thinking about.
You can think about usability, and trying to make sure that
the design of the site is good.
That's good for users and for search engines.
You can think about how to make your site faster.
Not only does Google use site speed in our rankings as one
of the many factors that we use in our search rankings.
But if you can make your site run faster, that can also make
it a much better experience.
So there are an enormous number of things that SEOs do,
everything from helping out with the initial site
architecture and deciding what your site should look like,
and the url structure, and the templates, and all that sort
of stuff, making sure that your site is crawlable, all
the way down to helping optimize for your return on
investment.
So trying to figure out what are the ways that you are
going to get the best *** for the buck, doing AB testing,
trying to find out, OK, what is the copy that converts, all
those kinds of things.
There is nothing at all wrong with all of
those white hat methods.
Now, are there some SEOs who go further than we would like?
Sure.
And are there some SEOs who actually try to employ black
hat techniques, people that hack sites or that key word
stuff and just repeat things or that do
sneaky things with redirects?
Yeah, absolutely.
But our goal is to make sure that we return the best
possible search results we can.
And a very wonderful way that search engine optimizers can
help is by cooperating and trying to help search engines
find pages better.
So SEO is not spam.
SEO can be enormously useful.
SEO can also be abused.
And it can be overdone.
But it's important to realize that we believe, in an ideal
world, people wouldn't have to worry about these issues.
But search engines are not as smart as people yet.
We're working on it.
We're trying to figure out what people mean.
We're trying to figure out synonyms, and vocabulary, and
stemming so that you don't have to know exactly the right
word to search for what you wanted to find.
But until we get to that day, search engine optimization can
be a valid way to help people find what they're looking for
via search engines.
We provide webmaster guidelines on
google.com/webmasters.
There's a free webmaster forum.
There are free webmaster tools.
There's a ton of HTML documentation.
So if you search for SEO starter guide, we've written a
beginner guide where people can learn more about search
engine optimization.
But just to be very clear, there are many, many valid
ways that people can make the world better with SEO.
It's not the case that--
sometimes you'll hear SEOs are criminals.
SEOs are snake oil salesmen.
If you find a good person, someone that you can trust,
someone that will tell you exactly what they're doing,
the sort of person where you get good references, or you've
seen their work and it's very helpful, and they'll explain
exactly what they're doing, they can
absolutely help your website.
So I just wanted to dispel that misconception.
Some people think Google thinks all SEO is spam.
And that's definitely not the case.
There are a lot of great SEOs out there.
And I hope you find a good one to help with your website.