There are many webmasters who are investing significant amount of time and resources to improve their site’s SEO, expecting it will reward them a major boost in rankings. On the other hand, there are many webmasters complaining they can’t compete with the “big” sites, because they don’t have the knowledge and/or can’t afford decent SEO. Apparently, both these groups are wrong.
According to a new video from Google (watch at the bottom), hosted by the one and only Matt Cutts, good quality content (and unique) sites will be compensated for lack of SEO and may outrank perfect SEO sites, however with less good content. That said, i wouldn’t recommend you to neglect all your SEO practices as it still play a part in rankings, even if a smaller one in the recent years.
Good Content May Overcome “Brain Dead Stupid Things”
Matt is explaining that even if a website has a poor on-page SEO (“even if you shoot yourself in the foot”) but contains quality content, Google will still try to extract the quality content and serve it to users. As examples of bad SEO practices that Google is still trying to access and crawl Matt is pointing on embed binary elements, JavaScript (that Google just began crawling) or even pages with no titles.
One interesting statement that Matt is saying on the video is “we try to make it so that you don’t have to do SEO”. Does he means that Google is pushing towards a world with no SEO? I can carefully assume from that statement (and some similar others i heard in the past) that in Google’s ideal web vision there will be no need for SEO and webmasters would only focus on creating (quality) content.
As Matt is stating, Google only care about providing the best content for the users even if it has poor SEO. Google is always improving their search algorithm and Googlebot towards this direction and the most relevant example is the Panda update which definitely improved the way how their search algorithm is reading and understanding the site’s content.
On-Page SEO Still In The Game
In spite of Google’s no-SEO vision, on-page SEO aspects still plays a role in rankings. Just recently i discussed about a research findings, that on-page SEO impacts on search rankings– Pages with unsolved SEO issues may cause a drop of more than two places in rankings while solving these issues may produce a jump of 11 places! So i wouldn’t neglect completely my SEO efforts, at least not in the near future.
Here’s the full video: