The Good
- Clarification on Best Practices: Google’s Martin Splitt provides much-needed clarity by addressing the limitations of automated SEO audits. This is valuable because it encourages SEO professionals to focus on practices that genuinely impact rankings rather than following outdated or irrelevant advice.
- Promotion of Best User Experience: While Splitt acknowledges that some suggestions, like minifying CSS and JavaScript, may not directly influence SEO, they still contribute to better user experience. This is important as a well-optimized user experience often indirectly supports better rankings through improved engagement metrics.
- Encouragement of Critical Thinking: The article promotes a critical approach to SEO, advising practitioners to cross-reference Google’s official documentation before implementing recommendations. This encourages SEOs to be more discerning and less reliant on automated tools, which can lead to more effective and efficient SEO strategies.
- Focus on Official Guidelines: By emphasizing the importance of sticking to Google’s official documentation, the article steers the industry towards more reliable and proven SEO practices. This reduces the spread of misinformation and helps businesses adopt strategies that are more likely to yield positive results.
- Challenging Orthodox SEO Beliefs: The article challenges long-standing SEO practices that may no longer be relevant, encouraging the industry to evolve. This is a positive step towards modernizing SEO tactics and ensuring that they align with current search engine algorithms.
The Bad
- Potential for Confusion: While the article clarifies some aspects of SEO, it might also cause confusion, particularly for beginners. The acknowledgment that some automated SEO tool suggestions are irrelevant could lead to skepticism about all such tools, even though some do provide useful insights.
- Dependency on Google’s Guidelines: Relying heavily on Google’s official documentation can be limiting, as it doesn’t disclose everything about how search algorithms work. This might cause SEOs to miss out on other potentially effective strategies not covered in Google’s guidelines.
- Overemphasis on Opinion: The article suggests that much of SEO is subjective, which can be problematic. This might lead to inconsistent practices across the industry, where what works for one may not work for another, causing frustration and inefficiency.
- Undermining Automated Tools: By casting doubt on automated SEO tools, the article might discourage their use altogether. While these tools aren’t perfect, they can still offer valuable insights when used in conjunction with human expertise. This perspective might lead to underutilization of technology that could otherwise enhance SEO efforts.
- Risk of Outdated Practices Persisting: While the article challenges some outdated SEO practices, it doesn’t provide concrete alternatives. This could leave SEOs in a lurch, unsure of what to adopt instead of the practices they are being told to abandon. Without clear guidance on what works, there’s a risk that ineffective strategies might continue to be used.
The Gist
In a recent discussion during Google’s SEO Office Hours, Martin Splitt addressed the relevance of recommendations made by automated SEO audit tools. He acknowledged that while some suggestions from these tools might be useful, many are outdated or irrelevant to modern SEO practices. Splitt emphasized the importance of aligning SEO efforts with Google’s official documentation, as these are the only guidelines that can be considered authoritative.
He specifically mentioned that certain metrics, such as text-to-code ratio and the minification of CSS and JavaScript, are often highlighted by automated tools but have little to no direct impact on SEO. These metrics, according to Splitt, may be rooted in outdated research or practices that no longer apply in today’s SEO landscape.
The article also touches on the subjective nature of SEO, noting that outside of Google’s official guidelines, much of what is considered best practice is based on tradition or opinion. Splitt advises SEOs to critically evaluate the advice they receive from automated tools and to always cross-reference with Google’s official guidelines to ensure that their strategies are aligned with current best practices.
The Take
The recent insights shared by Martin Splitt during Google’s SEO Office Hours have sparked significant discussions within the SEO community. As one of Google’s prominent voices in the realm of SEO, Splitt’s opinions carry weight, particularly when he addresses the efficacy of automated SEO audit tools—a staple in the toolkit of many SEO professionals.
Splitt’s commentary centers on the growing reliance on these automated tools to diagnose and suggest improvements for websites. While acknowledging their utility in some areas, he raises concerns about their overall effectiveness in influencing search engine rankings. This skepticism is particularly pointed towards suggestions that don’t align with Google’s published guidelines, a point of contention for many SEOs who rely heavily on these tools for actionable insights.
One of the key examples Splitt provided was the “text to code ratio,” a metric that some automated tools flag as important. This metric suggests that a higher ratio of text to code on a webpage is beneficial for SEO. However, Splitt dismissed this as irrelevant, stating that Google’s search algorithms do not take this ratio into account when ranking pages. He traced the origins of this belief to early research on spammy sites, which often featured more text relative to code. Despite its origins, this metric has persisted in SEO audits, though it has no bearing on modern search engine algorithms.
Splitt also addressed the practice of minifying CSS and JavaScript. Minification involves reducing the size of these files by eliminating unnecessary spaces and line breaks, theoretically improving site speed and thus user experience. While acknowledging that minification can benefit users by speeding up page load times, Splitt clarified that this practice has no direct impact on SEO. This distinction is crucial for SEOs who might otherwise prioritize minification in the belief that it would enhance their search rankings.
A significant portion of Splitt’s advice revolves around the idea that SEO is not a rigid discipline governed by a definitive set of rules, except for what Google officially documents. Beyond these official guidelines, much of SEO is influenced by tradition and opinion—what Splitt refers to as “orthodox” practices. These are strategies that have been handed down through the years, often without question, even though they may no longer be relevant in the context of how search engines currently operate.
Examples of these orthodox practices include the belief that meta descriptions should be under 164 characters, or that certain keywords must appear in titles, headings, and alt tags to rank well. These practices, which were once cornerstones of SEO strategy, have largely been rendered obsolete by advancements in Google’s algorithms. Yet, they persist in the industry, often because they are deeply ingrained in the collective SEO mindset.
Splitt’s insights serve as a reminder that the field of SEO is constantly evolving, and what may have been effective in the past might not necessarily hold true today. This evolution underscores the importance of staying updated with Google’s official guidelines, which offer the most reliable foundation for SEO practices. However, it also presents a challenge: Google’s documentation, while authoritative, is deliberately limited in scope. Google is notoriously secretive about the specifics of its ranking algorithms, leaving SEOs to fill in the gaps with their interpretations and experiments.
This gap between what is officially documented and what is practiced in the field is where automated tools often step in, providing recommendations based on a mix of current best practices and outdated information. While these tools can be helpful, Splitt’s advice is clear: their suggestions should not be taken at face value. Instead, SEOs should critically evaluate these recommendations, cross-referencing them with Google’s guidelines to ensure their relevance and effectiveness.
The broader takeaway from Splitt’s discussion is the need for a balanced approach to SEO—one that combines the insights offered by automated tools with a deep understanding of Google’s guidelines and a critical eye towards industry traditions. By doing so, SEOs can develop strategies that are not only aligned with current best practices but are also adaptable to the ongoing changes in search engine technology.
