Is Google allowed to say this?
Was reading about Topix.net switching to .com and their (sadly too valid) concerns about SEO. They say that 50% of their traffic comes from search engines - 90% of that is Google. They ask Google for a little help on the best way to manage the transition. Google replies:
sites shouldn’t become overly reliant on traffic from searches and should find other ways to get visitors, such as by setting up user forums.
Seriously? Did Google just suggest that they should increase traffic by setting up user forums? There are a lot of answers that I’d accept from Google, but I can tell you that just isn’t one of them. It’s not just a “sorry, we can’t help you our algorithms are central to our business and we can’t tell them to you.” It is the nature of the internet, and the nature of Google’s success, that search is an incredibly important part of discovering content, for Google to brush off those concerns like that is plain ridiculous. SEO is a huge issue for almost every site on the internet and Google’s answer is that they should set up user forums. Great.
I’ve talked a little about this before, all people want is a little transparency on how things are going to happen - they can then take steps to work with that process. Right now, there’s theories and thoughts and probably a little midnight fullmoon dancing to try and handle SEO problems. It’d be nice to inject a little science into this. Although, the dancing is fun.
