Google offering SEO services

Except a few site clinics at the major search conferences, where Google has been present, they don´t give much advice as far as SEO goes. Yes, they have their Webmaster Central, but they don´t offer direct services to clients who want to improve their visibility and ranking in the search results. Until today!

In their announcement Google say they will take suggestions for websites until February 22nd, and thereafter they will do analyses and give advice to four webmasters. "Human Webmaster Tools" kinda?

Even though Google don´t say that these are SEO services (they don´t mention the word "SEO" in the blog post), they do say that their advice could make the sites better suited for search engines. And that is search engine optimization, right?

Interesting implications

There are some interesting implications following these news. First, the fact that Google is doing this in itself. Will we receice some new insight into their algorithms and way of thinking? Let´s hope the sites that are chosen to participate offer some real challenges to Google.

Second, these news are announced on the "Inside AdWords"-blog. Will we start seeing more collaboration between the organic search people and the paid search people in Google? Today their account managers, account strategists etc on the AdWords-side of Google don´t talk SEO at all. Could we expect them to change this? Or am I exaggerating the effect of this? We do know that the landing page has become more relevant to the quality score of paid search lately, and hence it is important to both paid and organic search. I guess we´ll just have to wait and see for this one.

Third, and perhaps most interesting, will this be good news to the SEO industry? I really think it could be. When Google tried the same in Spain before Christmas, they received a lot of interest from webmasters who wanted to have their sites reviewed. So there´s no doubt that Google attract a lot of potential SEO clients, but only a few will receice the clinic from Google itself. Hence, I think that Google doing this "sales effort" for SEO is helping the industry receiving both awareness and credibility.

What do you think? Please post a comment below.

/ Magne Uppman

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Thw whole blog post translated from Norwegian to English (by Google Translate):

We are here to help: Site clinic for the Nordic markets

11. february 2010 | 16.11

After the success with siteclinic on our spanish webmasterblog, we´ve decied to do something similar for the Nordic markets. A site clinic is where we go through the website you submit, provide feedback on them and share tips on how they can improve. This could make them better geared toward search engines, which will give better results in such as Google search. Hopefully, the work could lead to increased visibility for their website.

If you own a website, and have registered with Google Webmaster Tools, we encourage you to submit your site for participation by filling out this form with your website, contact person, phone number and e-mail address (this information will be used only in connection with this project and contact information will not be published in the article). Therefore, we also recommend that you review our policy for webmasters and make sure that your site meets the guidelines set. This is a requirement to participate in the program.

Why are we doing this you might ask? We are of the opinion that our guidelines for webmasters best illustrated by live examples. With your help, that is exactly what we plan to do.

Here is the schedule: You can start submitting your website now and through February 22. Then we will highlight four pages (one for Denmark, one of Finland, one for Norway and one for Sweden), which we will analyze. We will choose the pages that give us the opportunity to meet and make recommendations for the most pressing problem for webmasters. During March we will publish a blog post for each page where we share our findings and makes recommendations.

Written by Anu, Fredrik & Jonas - The team of search quality