Name: What are some misconceptions in the SEO industry?
Uploaded: 2013-07-14T04:03:33.000Z
Duration: 5 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today's question comes from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Which aspect of Google updates do you think the SEO industry

Where do you see many SEOs spending too much energy on

when they could be taking care of other things?"

"Which aspect of Google updates do you think the SEO

So there's a lot of answers I could give.

One is the difference between an algorithm update versus

When you're changing your algorithm, the signals that

you're using and how you weight those signals are

When you're doing just a data refresh, then the way that you

run the computer program stays the same, but you might have

You might refresh the data that the algorithm is using.

That's something that a lot of people just don't seem to

But a bigger one that they don't seem to get is I've seen

a lot of accusations after Panda and Penguin that Google

Panda, if you go back and look at Google's quarterly

statements, they actually mention that Panda decreased

So a lot of people have this conspiracy theory that Google

is like, oh, they're making these changes

And not only do we not think that way in the search quality

team, we are more than happy to make changes which are

better for the long-term loyalty of our users, the user

And then if that's a short-term revenue hit, then

Because people are going to be coming back

Google did this ranking change because they want people to

And that's certainly not the case with Panda.

It's certainly not the case with Penguin.

And so it's kind of funny to see that as a

And it's just something that I wanted to debunk that

And we're not going to worry about whether we lose money,

We just want to return the best users results we can.

And the mental model you should have is we want to have

People can always get their own data back out of Google.

And if we just choose short-term revenue, that might

But historically, we've had the long-term view.

If you make users happy, they'll come back.

And that, in our opinion, is worth more than just some

So if you look at the history of the decisions that Google

has made, I think you see that over and over again.

And Panda and Penguin are no exception to that.

So the other question is, "Where do you see many SEOs

spending too much energy on," or where do you see the SEOs

spending too much time or energy, "when they could be

So I think a good proxy for that is link building.

A lot of people think about, how do I build more links?

And they don't think about the grander, global picture of how

do I make something compelling and then how do I make sure

You get too focused on search engines, and then you, for

example, would entirely miss social media and

And that's a great way to get out in front of people.

So specifically, I would think, just like Google does,

Because if you look at the history of sites that have

done relatively well, or businesses that are doing well

now, you can take anywhere from Instagram,

And what those guys try to do is they make design a

fundamental piece of why their site is advantageous to go to.