What do you think Google is here to do

Google operates just like any other company. While some SEO agencies seem to see Google as a kind of sadistic headmaster, there really is no need to feel that what Google aims to do is get in the way of your Search Engine Optimisation work.

Google and, in fact, Bing and Yahoo exist for a very simple purpose (ignoring the other aspects of their businesses, such as Android or Windows): To present their users, “Seachers” with relevant web content for the searches they receive. That’s it, that’s the lot.

How they go about this though, is the thing which can make life difficult for optimisers. Panda was a classic example, as was the recent change to the session assignment in Google Analytics. Both changes were aimed at improving the quality of search, Google Panda, by imposing a level of expectation on the content of a site that many webmasters had not felt the need to attain, and the Analytics change by providing greater segmentation to the routes that visitors used to reach your content.

The annoyance comes from a number of places within an optimiser’s brain, but largely from that bit of the old grey matter that likes regularity and routine. A spoof Panda ad from an Australian SEO company showed Panda as a destructive force that derailed SEO efforts based on spinning out large volumes of articles. Likewise the Google Analytics change will make a change to where baselines for traffic are within millions of campaigns, Google did say that probably most will see a less than 1% change but SEO MOZ staff have already seen much greater changes in their campaigns. The problem is that SEO companies get into a groove and they don’t want to get out of it, and often look a little foolish to their clients, and find the route that will become a new comfort zone.

Well, it’s not a popular opinion, but “suck it up”. Google is going to continue to try and make their search engine the best and in doing so they are most likely going to derail a number of well established SEO routines that we as an industry cling to and it’s up to each individual SEO company out there to keep up with the new tactics and to prepare themselves for the unexpected. We are!