Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Day 3 · Friday 2 October 2026 · 10:45
Only one community talk was recorded: writing for people rather than for search-engine metrics, with a case study from the speaker's own company. The other talks of this block were not captured.
In Lightning session K (Facets of quality), a community speaker argued that SEO is for humans: write for people and the problems they have, rather than to please Googlebot.
“SEO is for humans”
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
A community speaker recalled that around 2009 writers bent titles and phrases to include a keyword because their CMS counted keyword density, and said that hitting the ratio really worked at the time.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Entering the Polish market late, against strong competition and with a small team, a community speaker's team could not be a 'department store' that covers everything, so it went really deep instead of going broad.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
To choose what to cover in depth, a community speaker's team used Google Trends to find what people in their market were interested in and then gave them that content.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
A community speaker reported that going deep instead of broad took the Polish edition of a large Spanish software-download website into the top three technology websites in Poland (period not stated).
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
With a much smaller team, the Polish edition of a large Spanish software-download website reached double the organic traffic of the site's English edition, a community speaker reported (period and measure not stated).
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Because Googlebot is not a human, the speaker's team at the time thought more about Googlebot than about human readers, a community speaker said.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
A community speaker compared Googlebot to an inspector who cannot enter the shop and only looks through the window, seeing the page as ones and zeros, which the speaker linked to tokenization.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Because a bot that counts things was easy to work around, SEOs made the facade of their sites nice and fancy instead of focusing on what was inside, sometimes with no real shop behind the facade, a community speaker said.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Google updates such as Panda and Penguin made Google steadily better at seeing past the facade of a site, a community speaker said.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
With AI, Google can finally look inside the shop and check how a page's content matches its storefront, a community speaker said.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Google's long-standing advice to write for people and give them what they want has become true in practice because Googlebot has become more and more human, a community speaker argued.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
In a community speaker's case study from the speaker's current company, a well-written, complex and complete article got 1,600,000 impressions, while an article written for a very specific audience got 46,000 impressions over the same period (data source and period length not stated).
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
The niche article in a community speaker's case study was written for a very specific audience: a group of friends who wanted to play a game, had problems with a public server and looked for alternatives.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Despite far fewer impressions (46,000 against 1,600,000), the niche article in a community speaker's case study got 28 times more clicks than the comprehensive article over the same period.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
In the same case study, visitors who landed on the niche article converted 10 times more than visitors of the comprehensive article, a community speaker reported.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Conversions from content are real money that can be reported to stakeholders and shareholders, not an abstract KPI, a community speaker said.
“This is not some abstract KPI. This is real money that you can report to your stakeholders”
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
The niche article in a community speaker's case study worked because the team stopped to analyse how people use the company's products and what the products bring them, then wrote about it.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
A community speaker's exercise: step out of your shop, look at your site from across the street the way users do, and check what problems its pages solve.
“walk out of your shop. Stand on the other side of the street, look at the shop the way your users are looking at it”
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
If you cannot say what problems your pages solve for users, or the answer is 'it depends', you are optimising for the search engine rather than for people, and that will not work for long, a community speaker warned.
Speaker Community speakersEvidence transcript
Google's spam policies define keyword stuffing as filling a web page with keywords or numbers to manipulate rankings in Google Search, for example repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural.
“filling a web page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings in Google Search results”
Publisher Google Search Central
Google's guide to people-first content lists writing to a particular word count, in the belief that Google prefers one, as a warning sign of search engine-first content, and says Google has no preferred word count.
“Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't.)”
Publisher Google Search Central
Google's guide to people-first content lists producing lots of content on many different topics, in the hope that some of it performs well in search results, as a warning sign of search engine-first content.
Publisher Google Search Central
Google's ranking systems guide lists Panda as a retired system: announced in 2011 to better ensure that high-quality and original content appears in search results, it became part of the core ranking systems in 2015.
Publisher Google Search Central
Google's ranking systems guide lists Penguin as a retired system: announced in 2012 to combat link spam, it was integrated into the core ranking systems in 2016.
Publisher Google Search Central
Google's guide to people-first content says its automated ranking systems are designed to prioritise helpful, reliable information created to benefit people, not content created to manipulate search engine rankings.
Publisher Google Search Central
Google's ranking systems guide says the helpful content system, announced in 2022 as the Helpful Content Update to show original, helpful content written by people, for people, became part of the core ranking systems in March 2024.
Publisher Google Search Central
Do not treat keyword-density or word-count scores from CMS plugins as editorial targets: Google's spam policies treat filling a page with keywords to manipulate rankings as keyword stuffing, and Google says it has no preferred word count.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
The inspector metaphor blends two steps: Googlebot fetches pages during crawling, while tokenization happens later when the page is processed for the index, as Google explained on Day 2.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Of the two updates named on stage as letting Google see past a site's facade, only Panda targeted content quality; Penguin targeted link spam, and both have been part of Google's core ranking systems since 2015 and 2016, so neither runs as a separate system today.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Impressions and business value can diverge sharply, so judge each article by its clicks and conversions, not by its impressions alone, before deciding which content to expand or retire.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
The case-study figures were said on stage without a photographed slide, a data source or absolute click numbers, and together they imply a click-through rate nearly 1,000 times higher on the niche article, so use them as an illustration, not a benchmark.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
For content planning, start briefs from a concrete problem a real group of users has with or around your product, such as a failing setup they need an alternative for, rather than from a broad keyword the page should rank for.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
To choose what to cover in depth, a community speaker's team used Google Trends to find what people in their market were interested in and then gave them that content.
Google presented three uses of Google Trends for content creation, marketing and SEO: keyword selection, scheduling and ideation.
The inspector metaphor blends two steps: Googlebot fetches pages during crawling, while tokenization happens later when the page is processed for the index, as Google explained on Day 2.
Google does not store the complete sentences or the full HTML of a page in the Search index, because large pieces of text would be unsearchable; it tokenizes the text into the smallest segments that still allow search.
Google's long-standing advice to write for people and give them what they want has become true in practice because Googlebot has become more and more human, a community speaker argued.
Google's answer was that ML-based ranking systems are trained on content written by humans for humans, so they understand and promote natural content better.
If you cannot say what problems your pages solve for users, or the answer is 'it depends', you are optimising for the search engine rather than for people, and that will not work for long, a community speaker warned.
Ecosystem principle 4, incentivise high-quality content: content made for Search will not be successful.