In a recent post from Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, he shared how he compiles feedback on issues related to Google Search and then shares those details with the wider Google Search team. While Sullivan does this type of work regularly, he has only shared examples of those efforts with the public a few times.
What Sullivan shared. In a recent post on various social platforms, Sullivan wrote, “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 write-up that runs about nine printed pages long, covering themes, thoughts, concerns and suggestions that were shared with the search team. A sampling from that.”
The notes. Here are interesting excerpts from the notes, although he posted screenshots of them as shown above:
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!
Our guidance even encourages people to compare themselves to other pages in our results – something we probably need to amend to say something like I covered in this post. Do a search, look at the sites that come up. Those are what our systems find helpful. That said, the systems aren’t perfect. So if you see a site that seems to be doing things against our guidelines, it might not be successful in the future.
Over and over, people noted large publishers that seem like they can write about anything and get rewarded.