Sometimes Google's John Mueller has these one liners that I just want to share with the SEO community. He said on Twitter "SEOs don't manipulate Google, they manipulate websites." Here is the tweet:
SEOs don't manipulate Google, they manipulate websites. There's a *lot* of work that makes sense to do on websites, which makes search engines' jobs easier, and can help to position a page so that it's relevant to a larger number of users' needs.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 21, 2019
Of course, the Google guidelines mention bad players manipulating the Google search results but here John is being nice and explaining SEOs help web sites in search. In the duplicate content section it says "in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic." It also says "intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users." With link schemes you can manipulate PageRank and links, Google wrote "Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."
Google's documentation often mentions people trying to manipulate Google's search results, thus Google. But here John is saying SEOs don't do that, they only act within the guidelines and make changes to web sites to help search engines find, index and rank the page for what it is relevant for.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
