The (non)sense of Google’s Reasonable Surfer model
A lot of people in the SEO community tend to almost blindly copy and paste stuff they hear or read on blogs onto their own blogs, Twitter, etc.
The copy & paste problem
If the source people copy would be right, this wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the world we’re living in. Unfortunately this copy and paste behavior leads to a good chance of misinterpretation an awful lot of times.
What I’m missing is criticism. What’s the context of what you’re reading? What does it (not) mean? I’m no saint here either. In the past I’ve been guilty of this copy and paste behavior myself as well. It seems a natural pattern of people learning SEO.
But let us all stop copy and paste stuff that people say or write down, even be it Google’s Matt Cutts himself. And let us start questioning and thinking ourselves about what we’re hearing or reading. For example Google’s Reasonable Surfer patent.
Google’s Reasonable Surfer model
In recent weeks the SEO community got all wound up with a new patent from Google: the Reasonable Surfer model. As always ’search engine patent spotter’ Bill Slawski found it and wrote a great post about it.
But a lot of people did just simply copy and paste Bill’s conclusions from Google’s Reasonable Surfer patent. And all people seem to take this as the truth.
Unfortunately I rarely see people questioning these things.
Questioning the Reasonable Surfer patent
Therefore I was happy to found out that David Harry wrote an awesome piece questioning Google’s Reasonable Surfer model.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a really valuable insight into the algorithms of Google. But one major reason to question it for SEO’s sake is that the Reasonable Surfer model was filed back in 2004, which is 6(!) years ago…
So go ahead and and read David’s post: The reasonable surfer; makes for unreasonable thinkers.
And start questioning the stuff you hear and read yourself.
copy and paste is fine if you...
In the same category Google’s recent ‘May Day’ update got a lot of attention from the SEO community as well. Dave Davis does a good job putting this in perspective as well:
View From The Other Side Of The May Day Update
Yesterday there were also a lot of tweets seeming to say that Google changed the title length to 70 characters – it has been that for years.
There is also a related phenomenon which I call “Google Says” based on the kids game “Simon Says”. This is where Google makes an announcement and many rush to focus on it as the best thing since sliced white bread. Examples include better flash indexing (but better doesn’t mean good!), the use of rel=”canonical” and the latest info on site speed as a ranking factor. My article on this: http://www.antezeta.com/blog/google-says
Hiya Edward – thanks for riding along on this one. I often tend to remind peeps of the phrase, “Patent Pending”. It is not unusual to see a company using a technology with the ‘patent pending’ label. I can’t see why search engines would be any different. In fact, I’d imagine they do a ton of (real world?) testing on it before even writing it up for patent submission. This in turn means that anything from 2004 has likely mutated beyond it’s original state long ago.
And context is another issue. Because so many SEO’s tend to regurgitate or worse, embelish, they tend to see each patent in a void. They don’t consider the OTHER patents/methods that may have superseded the one currently being written about. There is no context. On that note, Garrett (French) and I decided, based on that post, to compile the link signals from EVERY major patent I can get my hands on from Google. To put some context into it and show how VAST the concept of disseminating it truly is. It should be an interesting exercise.
And it is rarely the ‘cut and paste’ portion of Bill’s post that get me going. It is the posts which reference some new change (MayDay, Vince etc…) at Google citing one of his/mine posts as the reasoning. It is reckless and ignorant. Even Bill tries his best with things like “may” “might” “could be” etc… that’s the responsible route.
Anyway, thanks for helping me fight the good fight! Always appreciated
@Sean
There indeed are many examples of this behavior..
@Dave
Thanks for dropping by and addressing the issue even better. It’s exactly the (missing) context that gets people talking about the wrong stuff.
I totally agree that Bill does an awesome job and always carefully describes what search engines MIGHT do.
… nothing is black or white