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We have a fun question today from India.
Shubhamstunter asks, "since Google has been actively
updating its search results, it is hard for people to trust
Google anymore.
Should one start focusing on getting leads from social
media other than search
engine results?" OK.
So let's talk about this a little bit.
Google has always been actively
updating our search results.
We always will be working on improving our algorithms and
improving our search results.
That's what you signed up for if you're trying to rank
highly in Google.
SEO is all about change.
There's going to be more change coming.
We're taping this at the beginning of
the summer of 2013.
By the end of the summer of 2013, we think it's going to
be even harder to spam Google and to rank Google on Google
if you're using black hat tools and techniques.
So we are always going to be updating, always trying to
change things to make things better, always trying to
innovate the way that we rank our search algorithms.
That's just the nature of the beast.
The goal is always the same, to return the best, highest
quality set of search results.
So rather than trying to figure out reverse engineering
the algorithm and trying to find all the different ways to
rank higher and trying to take shortcuts, as long as you're
trying to make a fantastic site that people love, that's
really compelling, that they're always coming to,
that's the sort of thing that puts you on the
same side as Google.
Now the other part of this question was about getting
leads from social media.
And I am all for having eggs in lots of
different baskets, right?
Because if your website goes down, then you could always
have a brick and mortar business.
If your ranking on Google is not as good, then you could
have other channels that you can use from print media
advertising to billboards to Twitter to Facebook.
So you should always have a very well rounded portfolio of
ways to get leads, whether it be people walking through your
door or Yellow Pages or whatever it is.
Because you can't count on any one channel
always working out perfectly.
As long as you have great content, you
should do well on Google.
But if people are spamming or you hire a bad SEO, that can
lead to unpredictable results.
So the one thing that I can guarantee is Google is going
to keep trying to work on making better and better
search results.
And if you're an SEO and you're really interested, or
even if you're a black hat or something like that, there's
always going to be some level of having to adapt or evolve
as part of that process.
And that's just the natural way of things.
But you can minimize that if you're trying to make sure
you've got the best possible set of search results, the
best, highest quality content for users.