SEOGoogle’s Matt Cutts on Search vs. Social: Don’t Rely on Just One Channel

Google's Matt Cutts on Search vs. Social: Don't Rely on Just One Channel

Rather than spending your time trying to figure out every little nuance of Google's search algorithm and seeking shortcuts, Matt Cutts says you should build a fantastic site people love and have a well-rounded portfolio of ways to get leads/traffic.

Matt Cutts

You wondered if you should just throw in the hat when it comes to trying to rank in organic search results and maybe spend more time on other avenues of traffic generation, such as social media leads or pay per click? This is actually the topic of the latest Google webmaster help video from Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts.

Since Google is been actively updating its search results, it is hard for people to trust Google anymore. Should one start focusing on getting leads from social media other than search engine results?

Google will constantly be upgrading its algorithm, Cutts said. It’s never going to be complete, they will continue to update it as spammers find new ways to rank and as they integrate new signals or change the weight of those signals in the algorithm.

Cutts added that since the start of the summer (when this particular video was filmed) Google has been trying to make it even harder for spammers to rank from black hat techniques.

“So we are always going to be updating, always going to change things to make things better, always trying to innovate the way that we record search algorithms, that’s just the nature of the beast,” Cutts said. “The goal is always the same, to return the highest quality set of search results.”

He said webmasters could probably spend their time better than trying to figure out every little nuance of the Google search algorithm.

“So rather than trying to figure out reverse engineering our algorithm and trying to find all the different ways to rank higher and trying to take shortcuts, as long as you’re trying to make a fantastic site that people love, that’s really compelling, that there are always going to, that’s the sort of thing that puts you on the same side as Google,” Cutts said.

Now what about getting leads from other sources, such as social media leads? Cutts discussed this type of traffic generation next.

“I’m all for having eggs in lots of different baskets, because if your website goes down and then you can always have your brick-and-mortar business,” Cutts said. “If your ranking on Google is not as good, then you can have other channels that you can use – from print media advertising, to billboards, to Twitter, to Facebook. So you should always have a very well-rounded portfolio of ways to get leads whether from people walking through your door or Yellow Pages or whatever it is, because you can’t count on any one channel always working out perfectly.

“As long as you have great content you should do well in Google,” he added. “But you know if people are spamming or you hire a bad SEO, that can lead to unpredictable results.

So yes, this is another case where Google is praising good content as being the best path forward, because that is what the end user wants to see. And Google is about making the end user – not the SEO company – happy.

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