SEO Articles

Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee and now a well respected SEO, was recently interviewed by Eric Enge. Check out the interview on Eric’s blog

The interview covered a host of issues and believe me, it is a must read for any SEO who wants to know a little bit more on how Google works. After all, Fox worked for Google. I will suggest reading this interview at least a couple of time to absorb and assimilate. The article is not just for SEO consultants but for any website owner.

Here are few interesting bits of this interview

“there is a wall between the organic search people and everything else at Google”

Fox states that there is wall between the organic team and the Adwords team. This segregation ensures that the organic search team is concerned solely on providing the best search results to users. They are not bothered about the revenue side of Google.

According to Fox, Google’s engineers are very loyal and love their jobs. She even claims that they have very high professional integrity. NERDS!!!

I will say that Fox, is just being too liberal with her compliments.

“Panda is platform for new ways to understand the web and understand user experience”

Panda has been in news for months now and has been hated with full fervor by most SEO experts and site owners. Fox, delved in detail with Panda and provided many deep insights in to it.

Fox stressed that Panda is important and is here to stay. Panda is a platform for new ways to understand the web and UX.

According to her, there are no short term or quick fix results for those affected by Panda updates.

A better solution will be to have an unbiased and dispassionate observer check out the site and provide feedback. Try to find which aspects of a site needs improvement. There are so many signals now apart from just links: Site speed, content quality, User experience, Content uniqueness.

Vanessa said that adding value to a site will play an important role. After all, there are so many sites saying virtually the same things with just different words. Content Sameness needs to be tackled with user generated content like forums and reviews.

Bottom line: Sites will need to be lot more interactive and useful then they ever were if they hope to succeed.

“I think it becomes harder to reverse engineer Search engines for a number of reasons.”

Search engines like Google and Bing continue to be more obscure. It is becoming difficult to try game them. No, it has got nothing to do with specific intentions but the nature of web right now. With so many signal around it will be almost impossible to measure impact of any one search signal.

Unlike the old simple days, when there were no twitter, Facebook and Google + buttons, now there are so many signals that try to game will soon become an exercise in futility.