As the newest member of the SEO team at L2T Media, I am still trying my best to tread above the turbulent SEO water.  It seems the more that I learn, the more questions arise. 

Lucky for me, I am surrounded by a wealth of digital knowledge at our search engine marketing agency and an educated response is usually just a holler away.

The “You don’t know, Jack?” segment will be a place for my insightful, intelligent, astute, and often brilliant questions to breathe – only to be answered by a member of the L2T Media team of experts.  Together, we will laugh, cry and gain the knowledge necessary to keep my head above water (not to mention, employed) for at least another week.  Without further ado, here is the first installment of “You don’t know, Jack?”

Jerry-like Google’s looking a little smug

How can we trust any of the “guidelines” that Google releases (also, how helpful can they possibly be) when their whole agenda appears to be focused on preventing anyone from “gaming” the search results?

Good question, Jack. We can believe (notice I didn’t use the word “trust”) Google when they write about what they want to see on websites, in backlinks, etc. But Google always issues recommendations and guidelines based upon their vision of an ideal web.

Does Google index and rank search results based upon all of the things they espouse to be best practices? Most likely.

Do tactics and elements not included in their best practices contribute to higher rankings? Yes.

Sometimes Google identifies elements that are less than ideal and isolates them away from the organic ranking algorithm. Google will try to do this with any element contributing to rankings that falls outside of the scope of ideal results.

In this sense, the webmaster or SEO agency engaging in what Google might call “deceptive practices” is more like the Jerry to the big, bad Google Tom. The “outlaws” will be a step ahead of Google, always hiding and moving onto the next hiding place when found.

There will probably always be certain tactics to employ that can trick Googlebot for a period of time, but none of these tactics will be sustainable in the long run. It’s for precisely this reason that we follow Google’s guidelines when it comes to our SEO tactics.

Our clients are in it for the long haul. There is less benefit and greater risk when you trick or exploit Google’s imperfect ranking system. Eventually, that particular tactic won’t work and could even be a huge SEO cost if used as a penalization factor against a site.

At L2T Media, we are aware that overly reactionary digital agencies can suffer from huge Google changes they didn’t see coming. As such, we’re moving forward, trying to look beyond standard practices with our work in social and video optimization.

That said, as long as internet users so heavily prefer Google as a search engine (which is dependent upon Google serving up relevant search results), I think it’s best to tailor SEO strategies to Google’s desires. Mostly.