SEO TL;DR #7: The Verge VS SEO, The Perfect Ranking Formula & Combatting Web Spam
SEO TL;DR - 15/01/2024
Today, I’m converting three SEO news stories, which are all intertwined. Starting with a hit piece from the Verge about how SEO is ruining the internet (again), to what the perfect ranking formula looks like, and ending with how Google is combatting spam.
Is Google making the web beige?
The Verge hit out against SEO with a piece on how the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms into a world where websites look the same.
While I agree that many of the tactics mentioned are pretty standard in the SEO industry, correlation does not imply causation. The best SEO practices are mutually beneficial, and I believe that you shouldn’t and don’t have to copy off everyone else to succeed with SEO.
It’s worth a read and a visual treat, but I’d like to offer a different perspective on some of the main complaints.
Site Performance
Google does better with site layouts it understands, so we’ll switch from using our custom design to a templated theme that promises to be good for SEO. Our site has lost some of its personality, but it’s loading faster and has a design that’s friendlier to Google’s search crawlers.
They seem to think that a fast site is only good for Google. All the credible research about speed shows that the longer a site takes to load, the less people want to engage in it.
Instead of switching to a theme that is ‘good for SEO’, you can spend time improving your current theme: optimise JavaScript, CSS and images, introduce lazy loading, and most importantly, make sure the user experience is good.
Design & Structure
We’ve noticed our competitors format their pieces differently: they chop their stories up into sections with headings that target Google searches. Let’s try adding these headings ourselves. They make our story choppy and harder to read… but it signals to Google what our page is about.
Does breaking content up into easy-to-digest blocks make it harder to read? It’s a misconception that formatting is a ranking factor; however, user experience and engagement are. At Venture Stream, we find that making content easier to navigate and read (specific to the target audience) leads to better engagement.
Keyword Research & Content
We can look up what keywords people are searching for and tailor our content to target those terms. We use an SEO tool to grade our writing and edit it accordingly. Pretty soon, all our blog posts are focused on these “gettable” searches.
In this scenario, the website must be putting out content which nobody cares about, and the angle is that it’s a shame that they now have to write about things that people actually want to know.
While SEO tools claim that they know what works, they’re just guessing (more on that below in the rebuttal from Google). Google seeks to reward quality and originally, reproducing something that already exists won’t get you anywhere.
Our shiny new Content Strategy is designed to pull in readers from search so they can be monetized through affiliate links, display ads, and clicks to other articles.
What was the original goal of this hypothetical blog? If they didn’t want to monetise it, they didn’t have to.
Trust (EEAT)
We have to prove to Google that we know what we’re talking about when it comes to pet lizards.
Surely, most people want to know an author's credentials and what authority they have on a subject.
Let’s add bylines and author pictures to every post, plus a sentence about why we’re qualified to write about the topic. And just to go the extra mile, let’s also add a blurb on every article about why you should trust our work. We’re also adding significantly more professional background details. We’re going to round up how long we’ve been writing about reptiles — it’s mostly true. Can Google even tell?
I don’t recommend you lie to your readers from a moral standpoint and the fact that the author bylines don't help you rank better.
The Perfect Formula for Ranking
In a long X thread, motivated by the Verge piece above, Google’s Danny Sullivan described how there is no “perfect page” formula to ranking (sorry!)
To summarise and paraphrase:
No one should feel they must work to some type of mythical formula.
Third-party SEO tools might advise that a page should be a certain number of words long. Following such advice doesn’t guarantee a top ranking.
Advice is often based on looking at averages — which misses the point that completely different and unique pages can and do succeed in search.
Google's advice is to focus on doing things for your readers that are helpful.
e.g. if it makes sense for your readers to see a byline for an article, do it for them, not because you've heard this helps you rank better (it doesn't).Put your audience first. Be helpful to them.
If you do this, you are more likely to align with completely different signals we use to reward content.
Any credible SEO freelancer or agency will back this up. Some of our best success stories are from clients who came to us for one service but were persuaded to focus on another first. Often good user experience and CRO yield better results than SEO alone.
Incoming changes to stop spammy results
In response to an X by Lily Ray, venting the frustration that she and many SEOs are feeling at the moment, Danny Sullivan replied:
We have changes coming to better deal with such situations. We're aware of it. We're taking steps to deal with it. It sometimes takes time to ensure solutions we put in place will scale and work well.
Lily shared an image of a “totally incoherent website that's blasted with spam and affiliate links”, which at the time, ranked #2 for the keyword “best weight loss gummies”.
The general feeling that many SEOs have is that Google is fighting a losing battle with black hat techniques, spammers and parasite SEO.
While Google is offering only words at this point, they do have a good track record of dealing with this kind of activity (frustratingly not as quickly as we sometimes hope). We’ve seen this over the years with sites being penalised for over-optimising content, penalties for those buying and exchanging backlinks and lost rankings for those overusing AI.
While it may seem tempting for brands to exploit opportunities like this, it’s not conducive to long-term SEO success.