Last week, I gave a presentation about Google Search results not being perfect, how we update to improve those results, and how our guidance to creators needs to improve. In this thread, I’ll share my slides and commentary for those who weren’t able to attend my talk…
Google’s results aren’t perfect. We do make mistakes. We don’t always get it right. We’ll never get everything right. But what we can do is keep working to show the most helpful content that we can. More here: blog.google/products/sea...
Our helpful content system is an example of improving Google Search: developers.google.com/search/docs/...
It launched last year with the goal to ensure people see more original, helpful content created for people. In September, we improved the system. That sparked some creator questions & concerns
Some people I’ve interacted with over the past few weeks believe our guidance about success with Google Search is new, that they now have to do something different. But for us at Google, that’s confusing, because it’s not new. The guidance is based on years-old and even decades-old guidance…
That’s led me to do a lot of retrospection. If the guidance isn’t new, why do so many feel confused? Quite simply, it seems that our long-standing advice of “Don’t do things for Google” is counter-intuitive to anyone who is trying to be successful with Google.
Our guidance is generally about a broad goal. For example, we advise people to think if they product content in a way that *makes you want to trust it* (not Google, you – or a reader) with examples of what might cause people to trust content, such as background about an author….
What’s heard are specifics. People focus on us talking about an author page as being something that people might expect from people-first content and believe Google itself wants that specific thing, as if we’re going to check for it and rank content better for having it (we don’t).
Further complicating things, some read our guidance and make definitive recommendations we’re not actually saying, like “If you have an About page, you rank better!” You don’t. It doesn’t work that way. Which leads to some critical thinking to consider when getting advice on ranking well in Google…
