Martin Splitt and I decided to make the interview very intimate, so we chatted a bit in one of the Google sleep pods at the New York office. This was a while back, in November 2019, but I held this video to publish along with the release of when he interviewed me as well on his channel.
Martin Splitt is on the Google Search Developer Relations team, formerly Google Webmaster Trends Analyst team. His focus on that team is on technical SEO, rendering, indexing, JavaScript and the like. He learned coding during his free time, starting when he was 12 years old or so. His first job was to build an intranet and then other sites, so he has experience building web sites and then software products and applications. He then got recruited to work at Google, in his interview, he kind of was sold on the job.
One of the SEO myths that surprise him the most is that Google is out to get you, the SEO or webmaster. He said sometimes they don’t answer questions from SEOs because the answers are not actionable. Plus, sometimes the numbers change over time, so if they gave a number now, it might be wrong in the future.
Another thing that surprises him is that when he gives an answer to an SEO question, and the SEO community responds to get the answer to be something they want it to say. So when SEOs twist the words, so that they can fit their own hypnosis.
He said most of the time, the answer is "it depends." He explained why the answer is "it depends" because there are gray areas. The truth is, it depends, is often the answer. If you want an absolute answer, it will be the "most defensive" possible answer just in case.
Another SEO myth is that Googlers do not like the SEO community - that is not the case. Googlers do like SEOs. All they want to do is build better sites. If you are gaming the system, then Googlers do have a problem with that.
SEO myths around rankings get under his nerve. There are so many factors and how those factors are mixed change all the time. There are updates all the time and it is not like they proactively did something with a core update. BERT is proactive but the core updates are not. These updates are usual business.
SEO myth he joked he wished was true, was that he could change a sites ranking. John Mueller cannot, Gary Illyes probably cannot. But he may like this video, maybe not...
We talked a tab about the evergreen GoogleBot as well.
You can follow Martin Splitt on Twitter at @g33konaut and at the Google Webmaster Channel at youtube.com/googlewebmasters.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
