Dear Matt Cutts,
I was reading Rand’s recent post and looking at all the comments from the members of SEOmoz, and it got me thinking about a few things. I started writing a comment in response to the one you had left… but after about 1000 words, I realized that my comment-sized opinion had evolved into a blog-sized rant. So I copied the text, closed the comment box, and pasted this beast into a blog entry. Hopefully Rebecca approves it before 2012. [Note from Rebecca: very funny, you snarky bastard.] Anyway… before we kick off this 3-page whinefest, lemme just get the obligatory “Please don’t ban me for voicing an opinion” speech out of the way.
You’ll see that my SEOmoz profile links to a site that claims to be the work of the World’s Greatest SEO. It’s actually just one page. Well… unless you count the old pages that got indexed when I had a Wordpress directory set up there. But anyway… yeah… that’s my site. Please don’t ban it. For the record, I think you are totally awesome, and the only reason I’m addressing this rant to you is because I am so confident that you will proactively address my concerns and fix everything…without banning my site. =)
In the You & A session at the recent SMX Advanced, you confirmed that Google uses a variety of different “penalties” to suppress low-quality (i.e., spammy) URLs in Google’s search results. It makes sense that certain violations warrant more aggressive penalties than others, and similarly, some penalties can be applied algorithmically while others require calling the oracle. (TrustRank joke…anyone? *crickets*)
Anyway…when I try to see things from your perspective, I imagine myself realizing that some penalties are too severe to apply based entirely on a computer’s interpretation of spam. I imagine that [remove an entire site from the index] and [remove a multi-page section of a site from the index] are both penalties that would fall into this category of “Human Action Required,” and therefore, I wouldn’t have to worry about false positives dropping legitimate (white hat) websites from my index.
So my question to you is…
“How in the world did a loser like you end up with The Lisa?”
Wait… no… what the Googley?! Oh! I see what happened… I forgot to switch our roles back. Oops! Ok… um… lemme just flip this back and I’ll try my question again. Hold on one sec… ok, got it.
So my question to you is…
“Assuming that I do everything in my power to maintain an honest, white hat website, and I have no intention of deceiving Google or its users, what assurance can you give me that I will not incur a penalty from Google?”
I mean, obviously you can’t reveal too many details about your work, because spammers would use that information to their advantage. But at the same time, I feel like there are certain details that you CAN reveal to the public that would benefit the “white hat” community and be useless to spammers.
Everyone who read (or wrote =P) Rand’s post initially assumed that a linked, 1-pixel image was detected by Google and was a serious enough offense to cause an entire directory to be dropped from the index. Personally, I would have been very hesitant to draw that conclusion, simply because I try to give Google the benefit of the doubt. I would find it very difficult to believe that Google’s engineers would hard-code a penalty that drops entire sections of a website if they detect an invisible link pointing to it. But after reading the comments on that post (and everywhere else), it is plainly obvious that the majority of the search marketing community does not share my optimism. Everyone immediately assumes that Google is some kind of evil entity that enjoys crushing online businesses and banning innocent (or ignorant) websites from their index.
Why is it that I can choose to obey your Webmaster Guidelines, and I can choose to be a whitehat, but I can never be certain that Google understands my choices? If I try my best to work with Google and I put forth the extra time and energy (and money) to provide the highest-quality website possible, why should I still have to worry about being penalized for something I missed? I guess I just don’t understand how you can promote white hat SEO, yet you give us so little to work with. I mean, it almost seems like you’ve created a sense of paranoia and fear amongst the white hat community, and the only people who have nothing to worry about are the spammers. If their throw-away domain gets banned, who cares? They have 100 more to burn. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain! Is it really any wonder why SMX Advanced “turned to the dark side”?
I’ve been doing white hat SEO since I started in this industry, and it’s the only SEO I’ve ever been taught. To be perfectly honest, it has been a tremendous letdown. I worked for a white hat SEO company, and I hated it. The reason being…it required me to be dishonest. It required me to deceive my clients. The fact of the matter is white hat SEO is founded on a loose set of guidelines that no one completely understands. Only you and your colleagues know the exact details of how Google works, and without access to that knowledge, white hat SEO will never be “advanced” like black hat SEO is. How can there be advanced white hat SEO without an advanced understanding of how Google works? Let me tell you from experience: providing a client with advanced white hat SEO is nothing more than ignorant guesswork, followed by an elaborate excuse for why their rankings went down. Advanced white hat SEO doesn’t require an understanding of the Webmaster Guidelines–it requires an understanding of human psychology–that way you can trick your clients into thinking that their SEO project’s cost was worth it.
Another reason why white hat SEO isn’t advanced is because white hat SEO information is centered around “what you should do if you’re designing a website,” or in other words, “what you should have done.” This is great IN THEORY, but it does absolutely nothing for the sites that already exist.
As an SEO, I’m not building sites! I’m trying to turn my client’s 8 year-old, FrontPage-driven, nightmare-of-a-site into something that can rank for relevant keywords. Plus, I need to accomplish this in a short period of time, without changing the look and feel, and without damaging the rankings they already have. What am I supposed to do? Should I just recommend that they implement a hierarchical information structure? Should I tell them to change all their links to plain text? Write descriptive content that contains relevant keywords–but not TOO many keywords?
The point is, white hat SEO is inherently NOT advanced because you (Google) haven’t clearly painted a target for us to shoot at. Blackhats know exactly what their goal is, and therefore they can find creative ways to achieve those goals faster and easier.
Google says that links improve rankings::Blackhats write programs that automatically build links.
Google says that unique content improves rankings::Blackhats write programs that automatically write content.
Every black hat SEO technique starts with one thing: a clear target. They know exactly what works because you have TOLD them what works. Meanwhile, the white hat SEO community works towards goals like “Provide unique and valuable content that people will like. It doesn’t REALLY have to be factual or useful…as long as it’s perceived to be factual or useful by the general population.”
I mean, come on…Google doesn’t even have a way to automatically monitor rankings, and the only data we can actually use is rarely updated and never accurate. Is that the best we deserve? When is Google going to make an effort to reward the white hat SEO community, instead of just penalizing the spammers? From where we’re standing, it looks like the only benefit of doing things the “right” way is that we probably won’t get penalized. In my opinion, that’s not enough. I think I should be able to CHOOSE to be a whitehat, I should know exactly what my target is, and I shouldn’t have to GUESS whether or not I’m doing something wrong.
The fact that everyone on this blog (most of whom are whitehats) immediately jumped to the conclusion that Google had penalized that site just goes to show that Google is not doing enough to help and inform the white hat community–and it CERTAINLY isn’t giving us enough information to form advanced techniques from. There is a huge difference between being “anti-blackhat” and being “pro-whitehat.” I see Google as the former, not the latter.
Give me an advanced understanding of how Google works, and I’ll invent advanced white hat SEO. Until then…I’ll be getting my fix of advanced knowledge from the only side that has something to offer: the dark side.
