Its Official - Google doesn’t hate SEO’s - but we do have an image problem

August 31st, 2007

Lisa Barrone from Bruce Clay followed up my previous post on whether Google hated SEO’s (from the 8th of August) which provoked the following response from none other than Matt Cutts from Google

“I also feel like if Google hated SEO, we’d know it. Google isn’t just tolerating SEOs; they’re going out of their way to help them and give them access to more information. We’ll always want more information and more data and more transparency, but if you look at what they’ve given us over the years, it’s pretty impressive.”

What you said. Google definitely doesn’t hate SEO. Sure, there are some bad SEOs out there that do bad things - sometimes even illegal things. See e.g. http://justinsomnia.org/2007/08/search-engine-marketeers-are-the-new-script-kiddies/
Stuff like that ends up giving SEO a black-eye with lots of people. And you only need to watch the Scoble video to see that SEO has an image problem with some non-SEO folks.

But Googlers know that there are a ton of great SEOs out there that help clients improve their sites and make the web more crawlable. And the more that we can do to help and encourage those SEOs, the better that is for the web and the search industry.

So the short answer is that Google doesn’t hate SEO or SEOs”

Which as it turns out followed on quite nicely from yesterdays post regarding changing peoples perception of SEO - and growing up into a respected profession - not an easy job - but one I would say is necessary in the long term

Entry Filed under: News and Views, SEO