Does Google lie to us? I mean blatantly lie… as in tell us (that is the SEO community) that something is one way, when really it is another.

In my opinion they do. I believe that Google justifies providing the SEO community with misleading information in order to minimize web spam and improve search results.

One example to back up this opinion… nofollow keywords. Google was the driving force behind the whole “nofollow” movement. Its purpose was basically to minimize web spam, especially with regard to blog commenting, forum signatures, etc. Google basically told us that the search engine robots will not follow those links and that no credit/ authority will be passed to the site that is being linked to.

So I ran a little test. I created a brand new website. I put no adsense ads on there, no Google Analytics code… nothing. I threw a few nofollow links at the site – a couple from some prominent, high authority sites that nofollow all outgoing links and a few from some other sites I own. Basically, Google would have no way of discovering this site unless it did indeed follow the nofollow links.

The result? The site was indexed in days. The site ranked well for several different keywords within a month.

Moral of this story? Don’t believe everything that Google tells us.