The best way to survive Google’s changes is to use solid best practices.
While there is a good deal of consensus on many issues, there is also a good deal of disagreement among SEO experts on the relative importance of various techniques. If you put three SEO experts in one room, you are likely to get five different opinions about what is important.
Google keeps its search algorithm very secret. This is quite deliberate on Google’s part. They also present a moving target by making lots of changes all of the time. Google has acknowledged a few items involved in their search algorithm, but for the most part we are left to do experiments and to make intelligent conjectures about what is really going on.
It is in Google’s best interest to keep everything secret. They want to present the best search results possible. They do not want to facilitate people playing games with the search results. By not revealing the details of their algorithms, especially including the relative importance of various elements, Google is better able to optimize the search results to detect and display “good” websites.
One of the problems is that SEO experts are human. As humans we have a natural tendency to believe that what has worked in the past will work in the future. When it comes to something as complex as SEO where nobody really knows the full truth then we can be in major trouble.
“What has worked in the past” is something that is up to interpretation. When there are hundreds if not thousands of permutations and factors it is easy to be mistaken about exactly why we got results that we did.
We also tend to adopt a particular position and then to try to defend it instead of being completely impartial. There are lots of names for this and lots of symptoms of this. It can be over generalization, use of anecdotal evidence, using sample sizes that are too small, or filtering information based on our preconceptions called confirmation bias.
I do need to note though that there are a lot of very intelligent good people with drastically different ideas about what is important in SEO. Many of these people argue quite passionately for their positions. I have seen discussions about relatively minor issues in SEO become quite heated.
The best thing to do, and indeed what I’ve tried to implement in this article, is to use best practices from a wide variety of sources. I get very pragmatic when it comes to SEO results – just show me what works. When it comes to particular suggestions I find myself asking “what does it hurt?” In other words, as long as the effort to implement something is not excessive, and as long as it doesn’t hurt my website, so go ahead and do it.
