Google: Do as We Say Not as We Do

Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 4:05 pm

Don’t get me wrong. I looove Google. Without it I would have been doing God knows what instead of marketing websites and selling more services/goods for clients.

We all have to play by their rules or else… You probably know what happens else or you can ask BMW Germany that got spanked for creating doorway pages, or JP Penney for buying links or Overstock.com for trying to get .edu links to their site.

The moral is – you have to play nice or you will be given the booth. It means that you have to follow Google guidelines when creating a website.

Titles, meta tags, good and original content. You know what I am talking about if you have been doing SEO for a while.

However, it turned out that these Google rules apply to anyone and everyone but Google (see the evidence below).

This is what the first listing looks like for the term “google keyword tool.

As you can see – the first result is Google itself. Now, just look at the Title – it says Untitled.

Now, think about your website and if you had titles like this. Do you think you would get top positions in the major search engines.

I don’t think so.

What’s the moral? I guess – unless you are Google you have to play by their rules.

My personal moral is – rely less and less on seo and more on Google Adwords and other ways to get predictable traffic and monetize it (using the tested and true direct marketing approaches).

What do you think?