Did you know that SEO bloggers like me are leading to less nuanced and less nuanced responses from Google searchers? As Google's John Mueller said on Reddit: “We love SEO news and bloggers, but it also means we can't give nuanced responses publicly.”
Of course, being an SEO blogger, I had to cover this, and I have no objection to this.
John adds: “SEO bloggers tend to take nuanced replies out of context, which can end up taking 10 times longer than it took to respond the first time, so I try to focus on content that will be a good use of my time, or a private response that will help the person who asked directly without having to worry about the noise of the internet.”
I mean, that makes sense. Sometimes I get it wrong. In fact, I see other SEO bloggers get it wrong sometimes too.
Here's the full statement he posted after someone complained that John's initial response was “dismissive and insincere”: “Sorry for the long post, I've been busy. I'll look into it more over the weekend,” John replied, adding:
- SEO bloggers tend to take nuanced replies out of context, which can result in a response taking 10x the time it took to respond than it took to initially respond. This is why I try to focus on what I can do best with my time, or give a private response that helps the person who asked directly, so I don't have to worry about replying over the noise of the internet. Longer responses like yours will inevitably be taken out of context and are nearly impossible to respond to. I love SEO news and bloggers, but it also means I can't respond to nuanced responses publicly (some people make their private replies public, which means less responses overall).
- We tend not to diagnose problems on third party sites, it's not as effective if the site owner can't actually do something better/differently than responding. I don't know if the sites shown here are yours, but if so it's easy.
- Sure, there are edge cases where using the disavow tool makes sense, but it doesn't make sense to confuse those edge cases with everything else (see “Nuance” above). If you don't know if your site is an edge case, it's not an edge case. A common question about disavow is whether it's worth the time to track down and disable unhealthy links. The answer to this question is simple: no.
Just to be clear, I am in no way insulted or find this statement wrong.
Discussion on Reddit forum.