I was recently having a conversation with someone about why I find it valuable that I don't do SEO services even though I write about SEO. I explained some of the reasons but one of the core reasons is that I see from time to time (not incredibly often) that when a penalty comes down or Google announces a new guideline or something - that some SEOs who have blogs will twist that announcement to fit their agenda for their company. Then I see Gary Illyes from Google post yesterday on Twitter that he sees the same thing.
Gary said it super well, he said "the theories are there because accepting things as is is hard, so people come up with stuff that fits their agenda." I believe what he is saying is that people make up theories or explain things the way they want to explain it because it helps their agenda when it comes to sell SEO.
Here is his tweet:
I said that many times, I'm sure John said that too. The theories are there because accepting things as is is hard, so people come up with stuff that fits their agenda. It also doesn't help that we patent things that we may never even use, but people take them for granted anyway
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 24, 2018
Gary's tweet is more broad of course than just my example.
I've seen this come up when Google announced that widget links are bad or guest blogging and time and time again, the examples over the years are really countless. Some people fight about it in the comments, saying that no - widget links are okay if they do X, Y and Z - that is what Google really means. Or some people say, guest blogging is okay if the links are to good sites. The list goes on and on.
Since I don't do guest blogging, widget link practices and so on - I kind of don't let those concerns influence my writing.
I did at times when I blasted Google for daring to tell me not to sell links. I eventually caved but you get my point.
I do believe that some, not all, SEOs that write about SEOs twist or word their blog posts to fit their agenda of selling SEO services. Although to be honest, I have not seen a tremendous amount of this writing in the past year or so.
Oh, I am so looking forward to the comments on this post. :)
Forum discussion at Twitter.
