A Little Less Greed, A Little More Effort

Two things landed this week that are worth unpacking. One is a technical nuance that exposes a genuine inconsistency in how Google's own guidance works. The other is a regulatory decision that, frankly, mistakes laziness for injustice. Threading through both — and through a few things I've seen on LinkedIn this week — is the same problem. People looking for shortcuts instead of doing the work.

The robots.txt thing — and why Google's advice contradicts itself

A WooCommerce site owner posted in a Reddit thread this week after Search Console flagged 51,000 URLs as "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt." All of them were ?add-to-cart= parameter URLs. John Mueller's response was essentially: don't panic, they won't show in search, robots.txt is fine for this.

Technically he's right. But it exposes something I think about a lot with clients.

Google has spent years telling SEOs to stop micro-managing. Don't sculpt PageRank. Don't noindex every thin page. Don't nofollow internal links obsessively. Concentrate on what matters. Trust the system.

So you do. You block parameterised URLs in robots.txt — exactly as recommended — and Search Console tells you they're indexed anyway. You block ?checkout and ?add-to-cart because Google themselves said those are the right candidates. And then Googlebot crawls them regardless.

Here's the bit that gets glossed over: if Googlebot is still making the server request, that's still crawl budget being consumed. The page might not end up cleanly in the index but the knock on the door still happened. On a large WooCommerce site with thousands of parameter variants, that adds up.

The real fix is upstream. Find where those internal links to parameterised URLs are being generated — breadcrumbs, related products, widgets — and remove them or nofollow them at source. Stop the URLs being discovered in the first place. And if you want to be thorough, noindex on those parameterised URLs as an additional layer is worth considering too — belt and braces. Yes, that's me recommending the granular approach in the same breath as telling you Google said don't bother with the granular approach. That's not me being contradictory. That's Google being contradictory, and us having to work around it.

I give these recommendations myself. I know some of them contradict each other. I'd rather be honest about that than pretend SEO is a clean set of consistent rules handed down from a consistent source. It isn't. The rules are inconsistent because the system is inconsistent. You experiment, you measure, you stay curious about being wrong. That's the job.

The CMA ruling — and the Flaming Moe problem

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has introduced new requirements for Google Search. Google must now rank organic results using objective, non-discriminatory criteria, give advance notice of significant ranking changes, and provide a formal complaints process for businesses affected.

My reaction: oh, come on.

Does any other marketing channel get held to this standard? The Wunderbra "Hello Boys" billboard didn't require Playtex to give competitors advance notice. ITV doesn't publish its criteria for ad scheduling. A supermarket doesn't have to justify putting own-brand products at eye level. Sex sells. Always has. Google is a business making commercial decisions and we've somehow decided it should operate like a public utility.

But here's the deeper problem — and The Simpsons said it better than any regulator could.

There's an episode where Homer invents the Flaming Moe. Moe steals the recipe, Aerosmith start drinking there, the whole city goes mad for it. Eventually someone reads the recipe out on live television. The secret ingredient is cough syrup. And nobody cares. Because the recipe was never the point.

This is Google's algorithm. Everyone wants to know what's in it. The CMA wants it transparent and predictable. The broad strokes are already public — relevance, authority, trust, speed, usefulness. That's been the recipe for twenty years.

Knowing the recipe doesn't mean you can cook it. And even if you can cook it, getting people through the door is a completely separate problem. But let's back up even further — because even if Google handed you every single ranking signal tomorrow, a spreadsheet of every metric, every weight, every factor, you'd still be nowhere near done.

You'd then need to understand how your site is crawled — how Googlebot finds, accesses and prioritises your pages in the first place (and if you haven't read my post on why the basics still matter, start there). Then how that content is processed and understood — can Google actually make sense of what you're saying and what it's for? Then how it's indexed and stored. And then — drum roll — how it's actually retrieved. Because retrieval isn't a fixed thing. It shifts constantly based on location, device, search history, and personalisation. The results I see are not the results you see. The algorithm you think you've cracked is being applied differently to every single user, every single search, in real time.

So yes. Tell us the recipe. We'll wait.

The businesses lobbying the CMA aren't really angry about opacity. Traffic dropped. I understand that's painful. But consider this — if I walk into your shop and there's dog mess on the floor and it stinks, I'm not coming back. No amount of knowing Google's ranking criteria changes that. The answer isn't a complaints process. The answer is clean your shop.

This isn't a transparency problem. It's a laziness problem dressed up as an injustice.

And while we're here — LinkedIn

I've seen a lot this week on LinkedIn. Opinions flying, hot takes stacking up, the usual. Fine. We all have them.

But there's a specific behaviour worth calling out. There are people on that platform — and we all know the type — who aren't there to learn, contribute, or connect. They're there to perform. To be seen. To grab attention they haven't earned. Engaging with everything a particular person posts not because the content is good but because of who's posting it. Flooding comment sections with noise. Mistaking visibility for value. And mistaking the whole thing for a human & not the bot it actually is. Some people deal with this better than most.

It's the same instinct as lobbying for algorithm transparency instead of building a better product. It's the same instinct as chasing ranking signals instead of making something people actually want. It's the shortcut. The grab. The hope that proximity to something good will substitute for doing something good yourself.

It won't. It never does.

A little less greed. A little more effort. That applies to your SEO, your content, your lobbying efforts, and frankly how you conduct yourself on a professional network. Do the work. The rest follows.