Google's John Mueller said it is wise to think long term with your web site and build a site that is so fantastic that if Google isn't ranking it well for relevant queries that Google would consider it a bug. Thus Google would have to update their algorithms to rank your site for the relevant queries.
This is something I've been saying for years and years "The end game is all the same, make your site the best so Google would be embarrassed not to rank it well." "I always tell people - you want to build a site and content that Google is embarrassed doesn't rank well for the queries they deserve to rank for. If someone at Google sees your content and you are not ranking well for relevant queries, they may decide something in not working right in the algorithm and work towards adjusting it."
The question came up when Pedro Dias, former Googler, asked about all the obsession around EAT and following the quality raters guidelines to a T. Pedro said it is not about following specific advice in the quality raters guidelines but rather to build a site that in the long term is quality and seen as quality by people.
Pedro said:
There has been a lot of debate and discussion about this E-A-T and what's in the quality raters guidelines and so forth. And most of people that kind of mean for these things are thinking of this kind of questions, like the one that just answered about oh do I have to have bylines and or authors in my website, do I have to it.And I think folks sometimes forget it it's a bit more about just product quality. I don't know if you would agree with that. If basically referencing what Amit Singhal wrote in the earlier posts about Panda and so for so on it would be something for people to to look at then trying to guess if it's a byline that they need on their website, if it's three introductory lines before their main content, or if it's X amount number of images on a post. Do you want to elaborate a bit more? Because I've been saying that it's mostly about product quality but people kind of tend to cling to these details about what makes quality but it's its quality it's it's different for everyone that assesses quality.
John Mueller confirmed:
Yeah, I think that that totally makes sense. And it's something where it's also worth looking into what search engines are trying to do in the long run. Which is trying to figure out which pages are good, which pages are relevant for individual queries. And what what they might be doing in the short term like looking at individual meta tags, looking at this specific technical detail here. That's something that is essentially just done with regards to the view on the long term goal. So focusing on the short term tweaks like how many links you should have on a page, or like how tall your author bio photo should be in pixels. Those kind of things, I think, are very short short sighted and it makes more sense to really focus on like what can I do to provide a really high quality product in a way that users look at that and say well this is really relevant this is fantastic content. And when Google doesn't show it in the search results for these queries then Google has a bug. And if that's how users think about your website and I think you're kind of on the right track.
See that line, "when Google doesn't show it in the search results for these queries then Google has a bug."
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Forum discussion at Google+.
