Why does Google lie so much about SEO?

Businesses and entrepreneurs are always trying to improve their Google rankings.

It’s a no-brainer to do and something that occupies a lot of time in your mind when you’re starting a business.

After all, without distribution, your product will die, and without search traffic, it will be tough to have consistent distribution.

So naturally when you want to improve your website’s ranking on Google, a natural source for you to seek information from is Google itself.

And Google does provide a lot of information. Much of it is seemingly helpful.

You’ll read things like “just focus on providing the most valuable content you can for your users and you’ll be rewarded in the rankings.”?

Or things like “write content for humans, not for SEO”.

All of this advice makes common sense.

As a non-SEO expert, you’ll read that advice and want to believe it. And without knowing any better, it makes sense.

Google is an almost trillion dollar company with near unlimited resources. You would think they’re able to employ methods of ranking content that are based on real human experience, rather than just SEO content hacks and tricky SEOs who are gaming the system.

The problem is: they’re either not able to, or they actively choose not to.

When I first started in SEO right when I came out of university in 2013, we were taught this mantra:

Google’s #1 goal is to show the most relevant content to their users.

The thinking behind that is that the more relevant the content they show to their users is, the more useful Google will be, meaning the more users will continue to use Google over the long-term.

And of course, the more users use Google, the more ads they click on, and the more money Google will make.

Again, this makes common sense. But it doesn’t fit with what actually ranks well on Google search results pages.

What Google Says vs. What Google Does

After years and years of repeating that mantra to any client, colleague, or anyone who asked me about SEO, in the past year I’ve updated the wording to my own, and in my opinion more truthful, version.

My new version reads:

Google’s #1 goal is to show the most relevant content to their users in the cheapest operational way possible.

Why does this change matter?

If you consider what the bulk of most SEO advice still says, and what actually ranks on Google, you’ll see a misalignment of user friendly content that doesn’t rank well, and carefully keyword stuffed articles that do.

For example, there’s a semi-black hat technique of repeating your page title twice on the page.

Your largest title on your page usually being in html as an <h1> tag, Google has guidelines about not duplicating this title on the page, with threat of a penalty if they catch you doing it.

But I’ve actually done this on some of my blog posts by accident before.

All of my blog posts on my sites pull the <h1> title directly from the database.

But in some of my blog posts I’ve accidentally left in the title of the blog post in the content section when I copied it over from either Google Docs or SurferSEO.

What’s interesting about these posts is that all of the ones I’ve accidentally done this on ranked really well.

Do you think it’s a good user experience for the user to see the same title duplicated twice on the page with the target keyword in it?

Google rewards SEO-optimized (sometimes even spammy) websites more than content written for humans

What about those annoying intro paragraphs that start off every blog post your read like:

“So you’re interested in learning about what is the best tool for cheap international currency conversions? Well, read through this article and by the end you’ll know which one is the best tool for cheap international currency conversions, as well as much more.”

People aren’t writing that in their posts because it’s relevant for the user. They’re writing it because Google ranks it well.

I’ve gone on kicks where I’ve said to myself “I’m just going to write the most useful content possible, and answer the user’s question as quickly in the post as possible.”

My hope in those posts is that people will find the content more useful than other posts, and then Google will reward me accordingly.

But the ugly truth is that my SEO-ed posts like the ones with the cringey “So you’re interested…” example above always outrank the ones where I attempt to be more helpful and cut straight to the chase.

And sadly, we can’t write content for humans. It does us no good if humans love our content but never find it because Google never recommends it.

So this naturally leads you to ask the question: Why does Google say they want helpful content while they rank the content that sounds like it was written for robots at the top of the page?

Well, there are multiple possible reasons for this.

1. They no longer control the algorithms. They have spent so much time, money, and training, and built so much complexity into their search algorithms that they really don’t have full control over what they rank anymore.
2. They rank the content that is the cheapest for them to identify and rank, and they give all the guidance about making it helpful and user friendly so that you’ll make the content as human readable as possible, within the confines of it being easy and cheap to crawl and rank by robots.

I think the answer to this is in the middle of the two reasons above, and the cause lies in the costs of the operation of crawling, ranking and showing search results.

Google is all about the money

Consider again my hypothesis for updated Google mantra:

Google’s #1 goal is to show the most relevant content to their users in the operationally cheapest way possible.

When you consider Google’s business model, it’s not exactly a cheap way to do things.

When you search for “best places to visit in Thailand on holiday”, they have to search the entire internet for all content that’s related to that query.

They then have to analyze the content of every single web page about that query and rate it for potential relevance to the query, and then compare it to all other other web pages, and then serve a list to users ranked by their perceived relevance.

What’s more is that they have to analyze more than just the individual web pages about that query, they also have to analyze the other pages of the website, as that factors into the relevance of that website.

They wouldn’t want to rank a website about travel in Taiwan for one post about travel in Thailand as highly as they would a website that’s dedicated to Thailand because the one dedicated to Thailand is more likely to have many more resources that will be useful to you, therefore making it a better search result overall.

On top of that, they’ll also analyze all the other off-site ranking factors like how present your business is on other reputable websites they’d expect you to be on, and how many links you have from other websites.

The more ranking factors they start to factor into the decision of where to rank your web page for a specific search query, the more expensive this entire operation will become.

And Google, before all, is a business. They need to make sure the cost of showing these trillions of search results costs much less than the revenue they receive from showing PPC ads.

They actually need to make sure it’s much cheaper so they can afford to throw money away at self-driving cars, AI, and any other number of ventures they want to try and eventually abandon (I'm looking at you Google Domains ??).

So how does Google do this, and how do we know that they do this?

This is where I’ve learned so much from the genius of Koray Tu?berk GüBüR .

He’s actually done all the hard work of pouring over Google’s patents for the technology they use to analyze and rank content, and then decoded them to figure out what that means for creating content that will be ranked well by their technology.

Google has thousands of patents for technology related to ranking search results. One of Koray’s most salient points:?

Why would Google spend billions of dollars on R&D and patents on this technology if they weren’t actually using it in their search engine?

The obvious answer is that they wouldn’t! The tricky part is figuring out which patents they’re actually using and which ones will influence your content ranking.

By looking at the work of Koray and others, we can see clear correlations between patents that exist and SEO techniques that work using them.

These patents and research show us just how much money and effort Google puts into ranking search results as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

But you don’t have to be a technical SEO genius to see all of the research that Google’s put into things like Semantic Indexing and see why “Just write helpful content for your users” is not actually worthwhile advice if you want to rank well.

(See my last post on why so many entrepreneurs fall for this myth of “Just write a hundred blog posts of helpful content and you’ll rank well on Google in the long-term”)

So why does Google lie so much?

They lie because just like every other Silicon Valley giant, it sounds and looks better if they pretend they have a beautiful mission that’s unrelated to their business needs.

It sounds much better if they say they’re on a quest to be the most helpful information-providing resource available to humanity.

Much better than if they said “we’re trying to train algorithms and build a system that analyzes web content in the cheapest way possible that provides results that are just good enough that users won’t switch to another search engine, allowing us to keep making money.”

So when you’re trying to create content for your business for the purpose of getting traffic for your products so you can make money:?

Don’t listen to Google’s lies.?

Look at the case studies of search results they actually rank highly and write content for robots that humans can get the most value from possible.

How can you do that if you’re a non-SEO expert?

The easiest way would be for you to learn about and use Semantic SEO.

Semantic SEO relies on writing your content using Semantic Indexing and machine learning concepts that allow bots like Google’s crawlers to more easily understand what your content is about and which searches it would be relevant to.

Essentially, you’re gaming the system by writing your content in the language that AI crawlers actually speak, making it much easier and cheaper for Google to crawl your content compared to your competitors.

I’ll explain much more about Semantic SEO in a future post and how you can use it to achieve Topical Authority for your website.

But if you want to immediately start taking advantage of it for your business, you can already have a look at some great people and agencies who can help your business implement it in your content.

People like Behzad Hussain and MALIK Zikirya who dedicate their entire SEO consulting work to these strategies.

You can also check out the LinkedIn group for Topical Authority here that’ll give you tons of free information.

Koray also has a very popular course on Topical Authority you can check out here if you’re interested, as well as tons of helpful free SEO content on his YouTube channel.

(Disclaimer: I don’t have any professional or affiliate deals with any of the people listed above. I include them because they’re smart people who are great at what they do and I believe in supporting other hard-working entrepreneurs.)