Google Says It’s Tempting To Optimize For Tool Metrics But There’s No SEO Shortcuts

Google’s John Mueller said he understands why some in our industry look to optimize for metrics within various SEO tool platforms, but he said there are not shortcuts in SEO and optimizing for those metrics won’t directly lead to Google search ranking or SEO gains.

This came up in a Reddit thread from late last week (still in catch up mode from being offline a lot this month) where John responded to Moz’s DA score, a topic we covered here numerous times.

John wrote in that thread a clarification on Moz’s DA, how Google is not impacted by it, the temptation to optimize for SEO tools, a theory on why SEO is interesting to many, thinking longer term and what it means to be unique.

Here are quotes from John’s statements on this topic:

(1) Just to be absolutely clear: no disallow file will affect your DA (or any SEO-tool metrics) at all, because Moz (etc) does not have access to your disavow file. (and regarding the rest of the post, I think I’ve mentioned my thoughts a few times :-))

(2) Moz is pretty clear on what they base this on – it’s worth reading their documentation to find out more.

(3) Many SEO tools have their own metrics that are tempting to optimize for (because you see a number), but ultimately, there’s no shortcut.

(4) This is (I think) partially what makes SEO so interesting, it feels like there’s a quick trick just around the corner, but when you get there, it’s different than expected, and even if it works, in the long term most of these tricks are smoke & mirrors.

(5) If you want to think about the long term (and I know not everyone does, knock yourselves out), finding ways to add real value that’s unique and wanted by people on the web (together with all the usual SEO best practices as a foundation) is a good target.

(6) Unique doesn’t mean a unique combination of words, but really something that nobody else is providing, and ideally, that others can’t easily provide themselves. A blog about Cancun hotels isn’t that. It’s hard, it takes a lot of work, and it can take a lot of time. If it were fast & easy, others would be – and probably are already – doing it and have more practice at it.

Here is a screenshot of this response in case Reddit removes it:

Forum discussion at Reddit.