Google Says SEO Does Not Cause Visible Problems On Web Sites

Update: Maybe this story does not make much sense, I am sorry for wasting anyone’s time with it. I was off the mark here.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he has “never seen a site where that was an issue which caused visible problems with SEO.” I wonder if any of you have. I suspect where SEOs stuff up the pages with content where it causes the page flow to be weird? Maybe some hacked spam SEO causing issues (but that is hacking, not SEO really).

I suspect what John meant is that best practices SEO should not cause visible problems with your website. And that should be true, in fact, best practices SEO should actually improve your website.

But you all know that SEOs do things that they think are best for search engines and are not thinking about the user, and then that may cause visible problems for the web site. Is that good SEO? Probably not.

Here is that tweet, but click through to see the context:

I’ve never seen a site where that was an issue which caused visible problems with SEO… I understand wanting to run a clean ship, but imo at that point you’re probably spending your energy ineffeciently.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 26, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.

More context on the reason this is confusing:

I was a little confused with this one too.

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) May 27, 2021

The tweet I was responding to was talking about 404s from JS & PHP files that users don’t see (the ones they do see would be tracked in Analytics, and could be picked up there). Google crawls tons of URLs that users wouldn’t access – just because some of them return 4xx …

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021

In general, with 4xx’s, it’s easy to get bogged down with individual issues & to spend time fixing them. In many (most) cases, that’s not going to make your site rank better. It good to clean out the cellar, but you make more money by building out your business.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021

Click through to John’s tweet to understand what I was getting at.