I just ran across a blog post written by Andrew Goodman in regards to commments made by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist at Google. Adam recently spoke at the SEM ’09 conference about common SEO suggestions that really don’t help in improving search engine rankings.
SEO Factors Mentioned:
- Meta Tags – Not considered in algorithm, most SEO’s knew this already.
- Keywords in URL – Little value in algorithm, nobody really knew how much value this actually had but certainly interesting to hear.
- H1 and H2 Tags – Not considered in algorithm, this is big news in the SEO community.
Does this mean you should stop optimizing these factors, certainly not. These SEO factors can still help with your rankings, just not in the way we may have thought. For example, an optimized H1 Tag may not directly help with increasing your rankings for a page of content but it may cause someone to link to your content with the Keyword utilized in your H1 just because you inadvertently suggested the appropriate anchor text to them. As you can imagine, Adam’s comments have been questioned within the SEO community as a way to downplay the importance of certain SEO factors in order to push Google’s agenda.
In the comments of Andrew Goodman’s post, Adam fires back at these critics:
“First, I actually suggested to people that if they’re building new sites or rearchitecting their site, they should consider making user-friendly URLs, including hyphens instead of underscores.
Regarding a few of your other points:
- Yes, Matt was telling something (re meta keywords) that a lot of SEOs know… but a surprisingly large number of webmasters around the world did NOT know. How else to explain the continued proliferation of very-stuffed meta keyword tags ’round the web? Why not set the record straight and save webmasters a lot of wasted time?
- More importantly, I have to heartily disagree with your implication that Google’s interests and webmasters’ interests are fundamentally at odds. While Matt and I and others on our team can’t give away our secret sauce, we *want* webmasters to do well, we *want* great quality pages to rank highly in Google. The advice we give (in hundreds of videos, blog posts, in-person talks, online webinars, etc.) is designed to help webmasters who create great content. So when we minimize the importance of, say, “keyword density” or submitting your site to “100 top directories!!1,” we’re doing this because we’d rather webmasters put their energy into stuff that’ll actually please their users and improve their sites’ presence in Google.
With few exceptions, we’re on the same side here. Controversy and conspiracy make for more fun blog posts, but don’t match up with reality very well.”
It will be interesting to see how this play’s out and what everyone thinks about Adam Lasnik’s comments, let me know what you think.
