A recent video from the chief of search for Google has attempted to bust some commonly held conceptions about how the firm treats search engine optimisation (SEO).

The vid, which is presented by  Matt Cutts, the Google head of search spam, discusses a number of myths as he sees them. The biggest of these, according to Cutts, is how people feel that the tech firm actively changes page rankings in order to furnish the search engine giant’s coffers.

He says that this is simply not true, explaining that search results are not affected whether a brand or company buys adverts from Google or not. He goes further still, saying that his employer does not adapt its closely protected algorithms in order to get firms to buy more ads.

However, for many in the search engine community, these statements are not always believed. Some commenters will tend to state that changing formats is in fact the company’s core business model.

There will always be chatter as to what Google does and doesn’t do to change search results, and Cutts goes on to say that anyone wanting to design a good SEO strategy would do well to not pay attention to such conspiracy theories.

Taking another swipe at detractors, he also said that the rise of ‘groupthink’ approaches to SEO is a bad thing. In this area, particularly, he has a very good point.

Psychologically speaking, unchallenged ideas taken en masse will rarely end-well.

Such thoughts do gain a lot of traction on a number of forums though, as people take to them to extol the virtues of a particular approach to get a group to follow. Initially, this may work but the long game approach will likely not.

As Cutts clearly states, if such ‘easy’ SEO strategies really did hold up, everyone would be doing it and ebooks explaining the details would be flying off the virtual shelves.

Steven Morris