Response to Heresy: Google and SEO Don’t Actually Change that Much by Rand Fishkin

If, in 2004, you balanced SEO best practices with usability/user experience needs and created a site with content that was optimal for people and engines, you probably had an SEO strategy that would still work today. You might need to make updates, especially with regards to your tactics for earning awareness (taking into account the rise of social networking), for optimizing to multiple devices (instead of just multiple browsers), and to keep your UI/UX enjoyable for modern users, but strategic-level SEO wouldn’t need nearly as much of a shift as these others.

I agree. While I am not an SEO person (I just read about it a bit when I have time because it is an interesting area) what you say is how it seems to me. Yes there are tricks that SEO people learn and can use to do well (I guess based on what I have read over the years).

But the core focus in the same, with just different tricks valuable at different times. It does seem like these tricks (that are mainly about exploiting weaknesses in the algorithms) are worth lots of time and energy in the right situation, to the right people.

For most people I don’t think it is that important. The principles that matter seem to stay pretty consistent over the long term, it is just trying to game the algorithm that is challenging. If it wasn’t challenging those people that are now making their money doing it would have a much more difficult time because many other people would be doing it. The challenge of staying ahead of Google’s ability to eliminate gaming of the results is why those that do it well are rewarded and if it was easier you would be rewarded less.

If you just do the basic stuff that doesn’t change, I barely make any changes over years. The only change I can remember in the last few years was adding Google Authorship – which has now become essentially worthless, so even if I hadn’t done that it wouldn’t matter.

My basic guide is this: Google wants to provide the most relevant content. It does this with significant focus on others opinions of your content. Google has to make judgements about others opinions and doesn’t do so perfectly. So getting links is important as that is both an indication that other value it (maybe) and that is measurable by Google.

Now, I don’t think Google is great at determining if links value what they link to or are saying – “look at this totally idiotic article.” I imagine Google, and other search engines will get much better at this.

I do think Google is absolutely foolish to ignore data from nofollow sources (since this is more about what companies chose to game Google by nofollowing everything that doesn’t directly benefit their own company than whether the link has value). The links from important people on Twitter are an extremely valuable indication that Google just wastes. They, or some other search will do this much better sometime (I would have thought that time would have been years in the past).

But essentially, you need to create useful content. Then get people to acknowledge that it is great. All the games of trying to get others to take advantage of lameness in Google’s algorithm is mainly noise. That yes professional SEO people need to pay attention to. But the extent to which that exists is mainly due to failures in Google algorithm so they will constantly be trying to fix it. They don’t want to provide the sites that do SEO best, they want to provide sites that are relevant to the person searching.

Related: Why Can’t Search Results Screen Better by Date? – Google Falls Victim to Google’s Confusing Dictates, Punishment to Google and Google Users Likely – Google and Links