Google’s Updated SEO Advice is Almost Correct

Here’s what Google used to say about how to improve rankings in their search engine results:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Here’s what they say today:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”

There’s some good, in-depth coverage on this on Search Engine Land, but I want to dive into why this new advice is, almost, but not wholly accurate.

Let’s assume that you have a page that is already ranking in the first 1-200 results for a given term or phrase in Google, and your goal is to increase that page’s ranking. The list of things you can do to achieve that goal is long, but falls into a few major categories:

1. Make the page more relevant
2. Make the page higher quality
3. Make the page more well-cited
4. Make the page more accessible
5. Make the page’s listing in the search results more compelling
6. Make the site the page is hosted on more relevant
7. Make the site the page is hosted on higher quality
8. Make the site the page is hosted on more well-cited
9. Make the site the page is hosted on more accessible
10. Make the site the page is hosted on a more recognizable and compelling brand

Virtually every individual SEO tactic falls under one of these 10 categories. And Google’s statement that “creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share” is the way to improve rankings covers most of these pretty darn well. But it’s portraying reality in a frustratingly inaccurate way.

The problem is, creating a website that people WANT to use and share is very different than creating a website that people DO use and share. And while the latter will help you tremendously to move up Google’s results (assuming you’ve done a bunch of other things right), the former won’t really help at all. The web is not “build it and they will come.” The web is “build something amazing, iterate and improve it relentlessly, and be prepared to market the heck out of it.”

I wish Google had phrased it this way instead:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that people use and share.“

Modifying the passive phrasing (“will want to”) to an active proclamation of the necessary ranking elements – usage and sharing – would be far more transparent.