Google has published its most recent Search Off The Record podcast, and it is filled with a lot of good nuggets like always, but I wanted to highlight one part of it where Gary Illyes from Google said that "there isn't all that much trick in search." Meaning, even for those that work inside Google, there aren't that many ways to trick Google to rank your site better.
John Mueller of Google said that he is sometimes nervous when SEOs go off and try to learn about information retrieval, that maybe that SEO will come back with some trick. But he said he has seen that when SEOs indeed do that, they come back saying "just make good websites and think about what your users are searching for." He added that "I love kind of seeing that circle close," that this is exactly what Googlers have been saying.
Then Gary Illyes from Google jumped in and basically said that even though John has been working at Google for 13+ years and Gary for 11 or so years, he said "there isn't all that much trick in search." He said "like we are not trying to trick anyone into making better whatever. What we are trying to do, is helping the user, the search user, and for that we are telling people how search works and how you can make sites that will be beneficial for users. There is not that much trickery going on."
This conversation starts at about the 38:17 mark into the podcast, which I will embed below. Gary does talk more about information retrieval, but if you read any documents on that, none of that should be too novel, that part starts at 25 minutes in. I'll probably get into that more tomorrow.
Here is the video embed of the podcast:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
