What statements/advice from Google do you think are false?

[goodroi]

Google has given webmasters alot of feedback and guidance. Since Google is not a charity I expect that some (if not most) of this information is more for their benefit than webmasters. I have personally made some good money from information I learned from Google. I have also encountered many new webmasters who have lost money because they forgot common sense and blindly followed some of this information. Veteran webmasters are better at understanding that this information often needs to be interpreted and adjusted for each unique situation. Just because Google says something it does not mean it is 100% correct for every situation or that it is the wisest idea for your personal situation.


What Google guidance/feedback/statement/advice do you think is wrong and that webmasters should ignore? Why? Please explain yourself.


Mods Note: Many people think Google sucks, they are a monopoly, Google kills businesses, their algo is broken, they always lie, and that they are just bad people. I think that covers the more popular Google complaints so now we can keep this thread on-topic with productive posts and skip the generic complaining.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

ANYTHING TO DO WITH LINKS

Google built their search engine heavily around links and entire industries now exist to exploit that fact. As a result any advice Google gives about links is 100% self-serving and a key component of any website must be handled with extreme care else an automated algorithm might deny a site visitors it otherwise deserves. Google has not yet resolved the issue they created.

[zeus]

Just theory : I think panda is more about how often a brand name is typed in a search and links to the site, not that much how the site looks. When google say make good content they mean then you will get more links. "make good content" oh I hate that explanation :) . I think niche sites and links to a site is king. Big company are just in front of everyone be cause its typed a lot in search and the links.

[graeme_p]

Link buying: of course it works, as long as neither buyer nor seller gets caught. If you are not too obvious, you will not be caught. This is a bad thing for people like me who have free to use information sites (the economics of link buying work worse than they do for subscription or e-commerce sites), but I think its true.

Toolbar PR: sometimes so wildly inaccurate that I suspect its deliberately that way to throw off the link selling industry who rely on it.

Treatment of no-follow: I think it possible that no-follow links sometimes count. Reasons:

1) it is an obvious way of dealing with sites that indulge in page rank sculpting, no-following all external links etc.
2) Some no-follow links clearly have value: if spam links are cleaned up the remaining no-follow links are a useful indicator.
3) I had a page on my site that had a much higher toolbar PR than I could a. It had few internal links, and the external links I could find were all no-follow.

[incrediBILL]

Saying Google is giving wrong guidance is kind of like saying you don't really need to maintain your car the way the manufacturer says in the owners manual and then sit wondering why the car is sitting on the side of the road with a blown engine penalty.

While I don't believe everything Google says at face value, mainly because they can't tell you the exact truth thanks to people gaming the system, I certainly have never gotten a site into trouble following their guidance.

YMMV

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I certainly have never gotten a site into trouble following their guidance.

Perhaps not, but since the Panda spring I have never got a site OUT of trouble following their guidance. :(

[bluntforce]

I don't believe Google is giving wrong guidance, there's just a significant amount of variance between published guidelines/information and observed results.

Their FUD is probably necessary, as you mention, to try to minimize the number of people attempting to game the system. To be perfectly honest, if a person knows what a title and an H1 are, there is gaming going on, it's all a matter of degree.

[graeme_p]

@incrediBILL, I often ignore things in product manuals: things like "use only genuine OurBrand accessories".

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:40 am (utc) on Sep 18, 2013]
[edit reason] Moved msg back to this thread after tidying up [/edit]

[aakk9999]

Mod's note:

I have split off the discussion on <title> and H1 into a separate thread as it was developing as discussion on its own.

The new thread can be found here: Gaming Google with <title> and H1 [webmasterworld.com]

Could we please stick to the subject of this thread here, thanks.