Why doesn't Google just tell us what it wants?

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of Keywords People Usecom the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi, this is episode 84 of SEO. Is not that hard? And today I'm going to be talking about, well, asking the question really, why doesn't Google just tell us what it wants? Now we're in the middle of the March 2024 core update.

As I'm recording this, and obviously at times like this particularly, you're seeing lots of site owners who have got their sites being hit and are tanking in their rankings, seeing traffic disappearing and obviously very, very frustrated. Anyone who's listened to me enough times will know that I've had this happen to me in the past. We got really badly hit in Penguin and Panda with the site broadbandcouk that I used to own and, yeah, it's despair inducing at the time when you can see something you spent all this time working on all of a sudden just sliding away from you, especially if you're relying on it for your income and even more especially if you've got people working for you so you're relying on it. Hey, people's wages as well. I totally understand people's frustrations and the emotional impact it has on people. At times like this, we quite often get people saying why can't Google just tell us what it wants from a website? I've followed all the guidelines as I thought they were given, and yet here I am with my site diving down the rankings. Now I understand why people want to know that. It sounds like the answer to all your questions.

If there was a way of just being able to go to, say, google search console, verify your URL and then have a score from Google that tells you exactly where you're doing well and exactly where you're doing badly, and telling you things that you should be doing better, giving you specific tips on things specifically to fix to make your site rank better in search engines, now it sounds great. But you have to kind of take a step back from that and look at what the impact on the web would be if we could just do that. If we take one step back and look at it, in Google's organic rankings there is only one first position. There is only one first page. It's a zero sum game. Only one site can be ranked at the top and every other position down from that. It means that if Google gave a tool where you could just score yourself and then be told exactly what to do, then the only sites that would get to the top of the rankings would be the ones who are getting this information off Google. That's obviously a massive disadvantage to the vast majority of the sites online where there isn't anybody looking at SEO, because we kind of forget that we're in an SEO bubble. Sometimes there's lots of people creating websites out there that don't pay any attention to SEO whatsoever. While many do, the vast majority won't.

I don't think Google wants a world of websites that adjust the over SEOed ones. I know some people believe in an over optimization penalty or filter that can be put on your site. I don't particularly buy into that. I think if you've over optimized penalties, those are ones where you've actually tend to have gone over the line in terms of doing things that are against Google's terms of service. I think within Google's terms of service there's nothing that's really an over optimization penalty, but people can argue that point.

If we had this situation where everyone who knew about Google Search Console could go there and be told exactly what to do with exact specific recommendations for their site, then we're going to be in a situation where those sites would all then do everything they could Then how does then Google be able to differentiate between all the different sites? If every site has optimized itself to the max that Google has suggested, then Google then has no way of differentiating between those sites. It would then have to find another metric that it then wouldn't want to tell you about. So While it sounds great in theory, to have this just be told what to do in practice would end up probably making the search results actually worse, because it would be a sort of spammers gold mine. If they knew that they could just test, test, test, test and be told by Google what isn't working. Where they hadn't gone over the line, then they're just gonna push, push, push and push and it's just gonna mean that the vast majority of sites which aren't dealt with by SEOs and aren't created by SEOs are never gonna get a look in. So I think that's the reason why Google is never gonna tell us exactly what it wants, and reluctantly I have to agree with them that I think if I was Google, that's what you've always gotta do. You've always gotta put yourself in Google's shoes and say, well, I don't have to just think about what's good for me, what Google has to think, what's good for them and what's good for their users. And while it might not be good for us as site owners and, as I said, I have definitely been on the negative side of this. So I'm not trying to be an apologist for Google and know how difficult it is, but I think it would be a worse situation if we were told exactly what we had to do.

I think there are risks, obviously as well. If they were to be very specific and offer this ability to be told exactly what to do, I think it's start for creativity. If there was just there's only one way to do it, then all of a sudden, all sites would start to become very, very similar and, yeah, it would kill online creativity and it also would be a massive competitive disadvantage to anybody who was actually trying to rank a site. The reason to study SEO and to experiment and to try new things is to find that edge that will push you above your competitors in a way that's legitimate and without having that unknown, then there's nowhere for you to go when you're in a competition with every other site that's trying to rank for the same keywords that you are. So while when the chips are down, it sounds like a great idea, but in the longer run and if you're trying to dominate your subject area and build longevity and topical authority into your site, then to have the ability for people to catch you without really having to think or learn anything from themselves then becomes a negative for you. So I think that the more likely you are to call for this is at times when let me see, when times are hard is when you're gonna call for it.

But when times are good, you don't want your competitors knowing what to do just to catch you up, just like that. I mean. Take the example of link building. If Google was very explicit in what was a good and not so good link and you could just check which of your links were good and which were definitely bad, then obviously people who were link sellers would be able to just test which of the links were good and which were bad and would be able to basically shortcut the system by knowing how to spoof links, how to make links that flew under the radar, and then that's gonna put anyone who's trying to do legitimate link building and build links organically at massive disadvantage, and that's not what Google wants. Google doesn't want people who are doing it organically and legitimately to be easily overtaken by people who are breaking the terms of service. And again, I don't knock people to break terms of service. It's a choice they make, but why should their life be made easier? By the same token, I don't think anyone's life should necessarily be made easier.

I do agree Google should give good guidelines and good examples. I think they are improving on the amount of information they're giving. For example, this core update and the spam update. They've given a lot of information about what's actually going on compared to how they used to. Could they do more? Probably, yes.

It would maybe be nice for them to give a few more specific examples, but I don't think we're ever gonna be in a situation where there's gonna be a cut and dry checklist do this, this, this, this and this and you'll rank top of the SERPs, because that's an impossibility. As I said, this is zero sum game. Any one site can be at the top, so there has to be some ambiguity there for people to work within so that Google can find which one to put in the top without it just being a race of. I said in a tweet, replied somebody in the city. It would be like having a sprint race where all the athletes run exactly the same speed. How do you tell who's won? It would be impossible if we all could just have an exact checklist. So I think unfortunately for many people I don't think we're gonna see a situation ever where Google just tells us exactly what to do.

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