On Friday, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, shared on X some internal documents showing how he complies some of the feedback from SEOs online and then prepares that feedback to share with the Google Search teams.
He has done this a couple of times before, in terms of publicly showcasing how he provides feedback to the internal Google Search teams. In fact, the photo above is from 2018’s snippet review team where Sullivan provided a lot of feedback to that team from SEOs and searchers. Danny Sullivan also shared examples from the internal Google ranking fair of notes and presentations he put together from SEOs and searchers for consideration in future Google Search changes.
In his new post on X, Danny showed how he is providing feedback to the search team on the helpful content update, parasite SEO, writing for Google and not users, improving Google’s documentation, and a wild idea to provide a tool to us to tell us what is considered helpful content.
Here is that tweet:
Someone asked me this week for examples of how I bring the feedback people have outside Google back into Google. Good question. I’ve done this in the past. Here’s a fresh one. After the discussions I’ve had over the past two weeks at an in-person event and online, I compiled a… pic.twitter.com/aqIL6TQHGf
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 3, 2023
Here is what the document says:
I’ll begin with something that’s not really a concern they have but the core cause of problems. Everyone is doing things for us. all If you tell someone to make people-first content, it’s not uncommon they fall back into thinking how they show us – Google – that it’s people first. “So you’re saying I should have an author bio to rank better?” No! They should have bios because their own readers would expect that!
This is probably the fundamental stumbling block so many have. It’s also understandable. They want to be found on Google, so they want to please Google, and the concept that the best way to please us is to actually not think about us is difficult to grasp. But it would be well worth the effort for us to find new ways to approach this and reiterate this guidance.