Google Tries to Make Sense of SEO again
filed in Internet Business on Nov.13, 2008
Well, here it is - yet another attempt to put some sense into optimizators’ brainless heads! Google team has announced a release of a free SEO guide. You can download it from Google Blog. It is a short yet feature-rich 22 page document covering the 12 most common areas (or stumbling blocks) of new SEO experts. The central character of this SEO guide is a non-existent website brandonsbaseballcards.com. And Brandon Falls is a popular man now!
It covers all the best practices such as Titles, Descriptions, URL structure, content and other things. The two perhaps most interesting parts of this small book (hey, you top SEO experts, you sometimes forget about this as well) are: stuff that explains “Nofollow” attribute once for all (I’ll punch you if I see you moaning about nofollow in Digitalpoint again) and a couple of sentences explaining internal linking. The bottomline is that you are not supposed to interlink all your internal pages within each other. Maintain the hierarchy or don’t complain that you don’t get any PageRank on internal pages!
It is a great guide for the newbies. But, I mean, newbies are unlikely to read it. Did they read the Google Webmaster Guidelines? In its current layout, the Webmaster guidelines are available online since early 2006. However, if we take a trip around popular webmaster forums like DigitalPoint or Webmasterworld, we will find the same questions all over again. How do I this and how do I that? When you tell them, they say thank you but still goes out and does their usual B-hat 
For me the new SEO guide will be a good check-list. I will read it and make sure I really do everything I should be doing. Well done, Google!
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November 18th, 2008 on 7:53 pm
It’s a good guide indeed to have the best chances at ranking. Like you said, will most people be able to find it?
Funny how brandonsbaseballcards.com redirects to Google’s homepage
Mathieu.
November 25th, 2008 on 6:39 am
Didn’t knew google have released a free SEO guide, i would be pretty interested to have a look at it in depth. Thanks for sharing it that would surely help me.
December 9th, 2008 on 12:10 pm
It’s all put together in a simple format, so now anytime you see someone asking the same questions newbies do, we can give them the link. I found the examples for methods to avoid humorous, although each one is probably seen.
December 10th, 2008 on 11:51 pm
I will definitely read this thing. Hope I learn something.
December 11th, 2008 on 10:57 am
I have always tried to stay 100% ethical in SEO practices, but I don’t think that I would use Google’s guideline as a “Guide to Optimization” because Google’s goals typically differ from those of SEO professionals. I guess it goes right back to that movie, “The Skulls”, if you learn the rules first it is much safer to break them.
December 11th, 2008 on 11:52 am
Nice tutorial.I am sure a lot of seo newbies do even look at the webmaster guildlines.If you want to know google,you should read the guidlines at least.good luck to all!
December 13th, 2008 on 5:45 am
Thank you all for the comments. Andrew, I like the “rule break” comment, however, I don’t quite agree with your thought that Google’s goals differ from SEOs’ goals. If you are in SEO on a long-term basis, your goal should be providing the most relevant content to a visitor (that’s what Google is trying to do). Or am I idealizing life too much? LOL