There’s a good reason Matt Cutts is currently one of my favorite bloggers, and no, it’s not to try and score brownie points or because he posted cat pictures (don’t care for either of those blog activities, BTW). It is because he is one of the few inside voices of Google to speak about how their search engine works. Googleguy sometimes points out interesting things too but he is often too vague to be useful. Intentionally vague, I’d bet, to throw off the black hats.

Take this recent Cutts nugget (emphasis mine) in response to a Newsweek article:

Reading through the piece, there’s a bit of an undercurrent of “SEOs must do some deep magic; maybe I should hire one?” Truthfully, much of the best SEO is common-sense: making sure that a site’s architecture is crawlable, coming up with useful content or services that has the words that people search for, and looking for smart marketing angles so that people find out about your site (without trying to take shortcuts). Google will keep working to make SEO easier and spamming harder.

Here’s where I shamefully admit that I don’t do much in the way of SEO. I spend the vast amount of my time creating and massaging content (programming, tutorials, articles, stories, pictures, blogging, etc). I figure it’s you — readers, bloggers, critics, site visitors — that will provide the SEO. Wait, how’s that? Here’s how I figure it works:

If I create something worthwhile then people will link to it and the search engine will reward me by moving up that content higher so others might someday enjoy the content. Yeah, some of the stuff I create is timely and it will not be as useful when the timeliness is gone, so the smart search engine should move that down the list in favor of other more timely content. In those timely situtations, I might do a little extra work to make it easier to be seen as time sensitive content.

To me, this is the fairest system out there because I know from experience that good content can and does rise. Sometimes it takes more time and sometimes the system doesn’t work, but with high traffic sites out there like Digg, Slashdot, Fark, etc, not to mention countless bloggers, worthwhile content will find its way to the top of search engines.

Keywords: worthwhile content.

I wish people who are concerned about their position in search engines would spend more time working on their content instead of turning to the dark side or spending too much time in the optimizing mode. It would make the web a better place and make it easier for the search engines to reward the wheat and penalize the chaff.

With that said, there is so much great content out there now — more than I could ever visit in a lifetime — so I’m certainly not complaining. I do see and respect the challenges that search engine architects and engineers face daily in trying to deliver the most relevant search results to a very demanding and diverse group of people.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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