Google. Precursor to Skynet.
Last week at SXSW, Matt Cutts, Google guru and SEO fiend, announced his company’s intentions to penalise aggressive SEO techniques and further promote sites based on good design and natural content. These imminent changes sound promising but then this isn’t the first time Google have preached their desire to kill off the use of less desirable aspects of SEO and not succeeded. Will this time be different? Are we seeing the dawn of true quality driven search and the death of artificial SEO? I’m skeptically hopefully.
There’s no doubt that Google’s dream of a superly intelligent GoogleBot that rates and ranks sites based on qualities such as design, layout, content, relevancy and popularity is commendable and admirable but, personally, I think it’s still a long way off. That doesn’t mean I won’t take to the streets in song and dance, rejoicing over it’s arrival though, ’cause I will, but I just don’t believe the technology exists yet to make it happen. Optimism for the industry aside, the harsh reality is that what Google proposes simply can’t be achieved right now.
Of course, I’m assuming that they haven’t invented some stupidly advanced, insanely clever and, if science fiction has taught us anything, malicious and maniacal A.I. system in between announcing Google+ and killing off Google Wave.
Cheap SEO techniques still work
The Panda update last year went a long way to reducing the issues surrounding blatant attempts to overly engineer and optimise sites to make them ‘SEO friendly’ but it still didn’t resolve matters nearly as much as was promised. In fact, I pretty much didn’t see any positive impact at all and we, as a company, still experienced a lot of issues with Google’s, occasionally warped, SERP algorithm.
Case in point, the Primate web site which, for months, lurked deep within search results recesses and only recently hit page one for the rather obvious and important term, ‘primate’. Depending on what browser you use, that is. And where you’re based. And what’s in your search history. And what your friends like.
“We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.”
Matt Cutts
So whilst I’m pretty sure we’re finally ranking as and where we should (I tested it out with one of least used browsers in the world, Rockmelt, and would be curious to hear your findings for the search term ‘primate’ ’cause it seems almost impossible to find any consistent results from Google these days. But I digress), our crawl up the search results ladder wasn’t due to Google’s preaching of design and content over SEO trickery. Fact is, I’m fairly confident we’ve only managed to increase our rankings by doing exactly something Google is meant to be discouraging – keyword stuffing. And whilst I’ve been very conservative in my stuffing attempts, I didn’t enjoy having to sacrifice the quality of our copy to squeeze in the term ‘primate’ a bunch more times on pages one iota.
And sure, you could easily slate our ability to optimise our own site but then I defend our need to do so as surely, by embracing the philosophies that Google is trying to cultivate, these SEO techniques shouldn’t have been necessary. Plus, when we were sitting in the top position in every other search engine for the term ‘primate’ and Google was still promoting the site primate.com – a dead site showing a 404 error page – on page one, significantly placed above us, I can’t help but feel that something funky was going on.
Alas, problem solved now at least, even if the fact I had to compromise our beautifully written copy with some unwieldy and artificially stuffed keywords leaves a slightly bitter taste in mouth.
Google’s stance is good for the web design industry
Still, all my negativity over Google’s bizarre handling of our own site is completely washed away by the benefits of what their approach (if they manage to pull it off) will bring both to ourselves and also every other web agency and developer out there. Simply put, if good design and good content became a measurable quality in determining the search engine rankings of web sites then suddenly we’ll have a strong business case supporting the age old argument that quality creativity brings quality results. Finally, we’ll be able to prove the benefits – in terms that most people will easily understand – that paying good money for good web work can bring.
Indeed, I find it rather sad right now that still so much of SEO is accomplished by some pretty dodgy and low-brow techniques and that far too many overly engineered and overly optimised sites, to the point of being off-putting and unreadable, still rank very highly and overshadow genuine, well crafted competitors.
That aside though, there’s no doubt that if Google can actually turn their preaching into reality and truly make their search results more focused on fundamentally important human factors, such as design, readability and usability, then the weight placed on content by creators will rise and the quality of sites and content in general will increase massively as a result. And is this exactly the type of world wide web I want to be a part off.
Genuine question: When >99% of people search for the word ‘primate’ alone, do you think they are looking for information about simians or a UK web design firm?
It’s a good question. As much I would like to say that people are searching for simians as your question leads to suggest, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. People who want information about monkeys will, of course, want that as their top results but people searching for us, by name, will want (and expect) to find us. It’s all relative to intent.
I mean, if I search for the term ‘orange’, am I looking for the colour? The fruit? Or the mobile phone brand?
All of this is why Google are using information such as location, previous search history, browser, online activity, friends etc because they want to try and serve the information that is relevant to the intents of the user as they determine by their data model of them. Now whether or not that’s either accurate or ethically correct, is another story…
I’m with Steven on this one: expecting to rank on the first page when your company’s name is a common word with much more relevant associations is optimistic, at best. Outside of the obvious simian connotations, how many other companies are called Primate? In what industries? Intimating that it’s Google’s fault that you don’t rank highly enough, so are forced to engage in a bit of modest keyword stuffing, sounds like you’re misplacing blame and should perhaps be treading rather carefully. Companies like Orange and Apple spend an astronomical amount on branding to make their common-word names ‘theirs’, which is all well and good if you have the budget to do this, but millions a month is way out of most of our price ranges.
Surely if people are searching for you, they’ll add a few more words to make their search more specific? Indeed, Google autocompletes ‘design edinburgh’ for me as soon as I add ‘web’ after ‘primate’, so something’s obviously working. If worst comes to worst, you could always buy the ‘primate’ keyword in AdWords and set some filters (geographic or otherwise), but I’m not sure it’s something you should really be worried about. Wouldn’t you be better concentrating on the more specific and relevant combinations like ‘primate web design’, ‘primate web apps’, etc.? (For me, logged in or out of any Google accounts, you appear on p18 when searching for ‘primate’ alone.)
Anyway, Google’s Webmaster Tools is your friend ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ ) for a lot of things. For instance: if you’re targeting a geographic region, such as the UK, you can set a Geographic Target (Site Configuration, Settings) which should help, but may do so at the expense of global ranking. If all your business comes from the UK anyway, though, then maybe it’s a good idea.
“and would be curious to hear your findings for the search term ‘primate’ ’cause it seems almost impossible to find any consistent results from Google these days” – the Webmaster Tools already provide these for you: they’re under ‘Search Queries’ and each search term indicates an average position, click-through-rate and clicks. You can also star them to make finding specific ones easier. While this won’t give you any insight into the extra magic that Google uses to make the search relevant to users, they do provide metrics for Google+ which, incidentally, have been utterly feeble on all the sites I look after. But hey, it’s not like Google+ is a massive disaster that nobody uses or anything, right?
Oh, these Webmaster Tool search queries now integrate with Google Analytics (Admin, Property Settings in Analytics; I think they tie automatically for newly added WT sites), too, so you can see them filter by country.
Have you thought about integrating this blog into primate.co.uk? (As a subdirectory or maybe a subdomain.) It’d require some careful research and planning, a few well-coded redirects and use of the Webmaster Tools ‘Change of address’ option, but given the excellent content here, perhaps doing so would be beneficial to your company’s presence. It’s not something to consider lightly, but if you really, really feel that Primate’s not ranking highly enough, combining forces may be just what it needs.
The point which I was more trying to make (somehow I have a knack of going off on tangents in my posts!) was that a dead site (primate.com) with a single 404 page was still being ranked by Google on page one for the search term ‘primate’ for a period in excess of six months and, that aside, it seems to be that keyword stuffing is a still a very valid way of increasing search result positions, contrary to the spirit of what Google is trying to achieve. Bottom line is that although I admire what they’re trying to do, I think it’s going to be a long while before the technology is available to accurately assess sites based on ‘human’ factors such as design and usability.
As for ranking on particular words, it’s a tough one. We knew right from the get go that ‘primate’ would be a difficult word to compete against and I’ve never considered that we would be the top position for it and displace sites like Wikipedia. However, I also believe that any company has the right to rank for it’s name alone because ultimately that’s what people search for and, whilst in the entirety of the world, more people will undoubtably be looking for monkeys when they search for ‘primate’, it’s entirely plausible that in our local area more people might be trying to find our company
Still, this is why Google takes into account things like locality and previous search history because the web is becoming so big now that it’s impossible to determine the best results that are relevant to the user otherwise. And yeah, we could focus more on terms like ‘Primate Web Design UK’ but I don’t want to plaster our site with slogans like that 
Finally, regarding the integration of our blog: you’re no doubt right it would help with our site rankings but at the end of the day, we prefer having an independent brand to pure SEO juice. Plus, it keeps things a bit separate in the eyes of our clients and lets us moan about Google a bit more freely
Anyhow, thanks for your awesome comment and your feedback, Stef!