Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller, warned against emphasizing too much on third-party SEO matrices. His comments on a recent discussion on Reddit’s SEO forum were in response to a website owner’s post who was concerned about drastic changes in the metrics and the effect on the organic performance of websites.
The website owner showed the following concerns.
- A 50% drop in the Website’s Domain Authority (DA).
- Spam Backlinks Influx, 75% of backlinks are acquired within 12 months.
- Spam comments, an average of 30 comments per day even though the website got only 150 visitors.
- Conflicting Website performance across various SEO tools.
Mueller’s Comments on Third-Party SEO Tools and their so-called metrics. Furthermore, he explained that these tools show tempting metrics like Domain Authority (DA), but they are inaccurate and don’t reflect how Google or other search engines evaluate websites. So, he warns against quick fixes against these metrics, calling them, “Smoke and Mirrors.”
Additionally, he commented that none of the SEO tools have access to Google’s Internal Data, meaning their metrics to evaluate and rank websites. So, extreme caution should be exercised while depending upon third-party metrics for website performance evaluation.
Focus On Value, Not Numbers
He further added that focusing on creating unique value for users rather than optimizing for specific SEO metrics, like spam score or domain authority. He said that long-term success comes from offering content that is genuinely unique and valuable, in compliance with SEO best practices.
However, he acknowledged that creating unique content is challenging nowadays as it takes, time, effort, and patience. If it were easy, competitors would likely already be doing it.
Key Highlights
- Third-party SEO metrics can be useful but not primarily.
- Dramatic changes in third-party metrics do not manifest how search engines acknowledge your website.
- Don’t chase metrics, prioritize creating valuable content for readers.
- You need to be aware of SEO Tools, as they do not directly correlate with search engine rankings.
