Back in early 2014, we published a poll showing only 10% of webmasters think Google doesn't like to them. But the truth is, that probably gets under the skin of those in the Google webmaster trends analysts team, where their primary responsibility is to help you webmasters. In fact, Gary Illyes once said lying is not my cup of beer.
John Mueller of Google addressed the topic right off the bat in his most recent webmaster hangout at the 1:28 minute mark into the video. He said "you can definitely trust us," and that it is "a myth" that "you can't really believe " what Google is communicating to you.
Here is what John said:
So one of the the common themes I hear around about, about the these hangouts, about these office hours, is you can't believe whenever Google says something, you can't really believe. Because they're just looking out for themselves.And from my point of view this is definitely a myth. There's no reason for us to kind of bring information out there on like how to make a website technically well that doesn't make sense. So this is really information that we put together with the engineering teams, especially when it comes to technical websites, making website so that they crawlable and indexable. There's a lot of information out there, there are lots of misconceptions out there and we want to kind of help clear that up.
So these are things that you can definitely trust us that we look these up with engineers to protect that what we're talking about.
He goes on to explain that things do change over time, technical things change, such as with the mobile-first index. Google does try to update their guidelines and help center, but blog posts are the current state. Sometimes Google will make a note on an old blog post to note a change in how they technically change things and sometimes Google forgets to update some help documents and update them later. But often Google updates their help content when new technical changes come out.
The dialog goes on for about seven minutes, you can watch him as he talks and he really does mean it. As I said before, I do personally believe Google.
Forum discussion at YouTube Live.
