Video transcription
Here’s a fun question from borislav123 in Plovdiv.
Borislav wants to know: Why Google supports SEO specialists with advice? Google business is to sell text ads/ad space so bad optimized websites are the target of Google, aren’t they? With giving good SEO advice Google works against its business or it’s not true?
OK, so let me take a step back and sort of rephrase what I think Borislav is trying to ask.
I think he’s saying, look, if everybody has really bad SEO and they can’t rank the way that they want then they have to buy ads and isn’t that a good thing for Google?
I think that’s kind of a short-term view of things and Google tries to take the long-term.
For example, we never showed pop-up ads on Google even though it might have meant a little bit more money up front because we knew it would also annoy users and make them less likely to come back.
So I think you’re making the mistake, Borislav, if you’ll let me talk to you personally for a second, that I think you’re thinking all SEO is bad or all SEO is evil.
And the fact is that there’s a lot of white hat SEO that’s really great for webmasters to know.
They make their site more accessible, so that everybody can find the pages on their site.
They make it more clear, it can help with the organization, so there’s a lot of reasons to help sites with their SEO so that everybody can benefit.
More to the point, I think whenever the web does well Google does well.
So we try to give white hat advice.
We’re not going to teach you how to cloak, we’re not going to try to show you the best ways to key word stuff or anything like that.
But we do try to give advice to all the webmasters out there who really could use the help and want to use the help in a white hat way.
And I think if we help people with all of those problems then the web gets better, more people use the web, and Google does well.
So I don’t think that it has to be something like, oh, we help websites rank better and then they don’t need to advertise.
That’s sort of a short-sighted view.We say, look, we try to help people make the web a better experience, more people will be on the web, they’ll stay on the web longer, they’ll be happier.
And just the halo effect, the reflected effect of all of that is that people will search more, and then a few of the times they’ll click on the ads.
So I think we try to take a pretty long-term view of things, and I don’t think that it’s smart to say push everybody down so they have to buy ads.
That’s not the sort of way that we think at Google.
Quick Answer: For a better web