One of the things I see a lot from the SEO community is that they think Google employees, Googlers, do not care when a site has to cut staff or go out of business because of a Google update. While that may be true for some Googlers, most Googlers I’ve met do deeply care and it impacts them emotionally when they see this happens.
The sad part is that the business of ranking web pages is about ranking web pages and not ever site can rank in positions number one through three forever.
Over the years I’ve seen many signs that some of the Googlers we deal with on a daily basis do deeply care. They understand that these drops in Google traffic directly lead to financial hardship, which can then lead to more serious issues in one’s personal life. Many of these Googlers owned their own online businesses beforehand as well.
Here is one example of John Mueller of Google showing on Twitter he cares:
I don’t think any of you (well, as far as I know) would be considered elitist from my POV, but it’s easy to accidentally fall into that trap. When someone pours they’re heart out with a problem that’s financially affecting them strongly, and the first reply is
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 12, 2019
So maybe they mixed up crawling, rendering, parsing, stemming, indexing, indexation, serving, ranking, or whatevering — that’s fine to call out afterwards, but it’s going to be hard for them to listen to you if they first get a “you should know it’s ‘X'”.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 12, 2019
This tweet was in reaction to some SEOs complaining about less sophisticated SEOs or business owners using terminology wrong. It really doesn’t matter, but just look at what John wrote.
I know I am going to get a lot of flack in the comments about posting this but most Googlers I’ve met do deeply care, they are human beings, and understand how the real world works. So to see signs that they do care is sometimes helpful for me to highlight once every five years here. 🙂
Forum discussion at Twitter.