The Reddit moderators in the SEO channel continue to remove answers that Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Link, is posting in response to some questions related to SEO and Google Search. It’s kind of comical to see this, because you’d think any forum would want an official Google representative to answer their users’ questions.
For example, there is a thread on Reddit called How many bloggers will remove their TOC plugins? He specifically talks about Danny’s comments to X about SEOs removing TOCs, the table of contents, from their web pages.
Danny Sullivan posted a long reply, which I captured before it was deleted, but it was deleted. He then answered four more times and they withdrew.
This was his reply that was removed:
I addressed this in several responses to X. It seems worth repeating here. The point of the post (it was all here) was this:
“Any question you have about creating content for Google will come back to this principle. ‘Is this content that my visitors would find satisfying?’ If the answer is yes, then go for it, because that’s what Google wants.”
This is. As part of making this broad point, I listed a few things I’ve seen people do because, as I qualified the things I listed, it seems like they might be doing them because they somehow believed that having them would rank better. . Here’s what I said about the tables of contents:
Weird table of contents stuff got pushed to the top because who knows, along the way, somehow that became something that I guess people assume ranks you better
There is no inherent “SEO value” to us whether or not you have a table of contents. Your readers can appreciate it. If so, do it. But if you’re doing it or anything content because you think “this is what I’ve heard second hand, third hand, whatever, it’s what makes you rank better on Google,” then you’re completely missing the point that the what our rating systems try to reward is content designed for what people like.
This also illustrates the difficulty of giving the guidance that SEOs want. They rightly complain that a statement like “Make pages for users, not search engines,” as we’ve done for two decades, can seem too broad or simplistic. But then, if we’re giving examples with ratings, the ratings and the broad goal can be turned off in favor of people looking for the supposed specific rank increase (as I explained here, see also here).
As I also said in the post, I don’t work directly on creator guidance. I make suggestions based on feedback to people who work in different parts of Google Search about all sorts of things. It is the people at Search Central who do the documentation. I’ve made some suggestions on how I hope the documentation can grow and perhaps become clearer to move people away from the “checklist” approach that can sometimes happen. Maybe it will get there.
I’m honestly not sure why Reddit moderators keep deleting their replies in this thread:
Here’s a screenshot of some of those removals and Danny’s comment about them being removed:
He wrote:
I left a comment clarifying some of this, which I found helpful. This comment was removed, I assume, by the moderators (who I also messaged and got no response). I left a comment asking about the removal, and it has now been removed.
The original poster of this thread replied:
I’m so sorry, Danny, but the irony of this is just too much!
While Google is flooding search results with Reddit, Reddit won’t let you comment.
I haven’t seen any response from a moderator as to why the comments were removed.
Let’s not forget that this Reddit community was overtaken by new moderators not too long ago.
Discussion in the forum a Reddit.
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