Consider yourself lucky.

I’m sure these blogs are quite popular, but you and I and other people who don’t get sucked into whitepaper blogs just don’t notice them.

As well, the “Google designing for Google” was what Google supposedly expects sites to do to be ranked well. I think it was just illustrating how you can wreck a nice design by optimizing for robots. That’s why I posted that /. comment, though. It’s pretty clear that if you have a site that people actually use, like, say, Google, then you really don’t need all that SEO.

Using Google as the example wasn’t meant to be practical, it just helped illustrate his point.

FWIW though, I looked at that Digg link – in all seriousness, how many of those “top bloggers” on that list are you familiar with? I recognized two.

Readers – don’t fall into the SEO trap. It’s largely urban legend and a group of snake oil salesman (Jason Calacanis said it first) trying to guess how the Google algorithms work so they can get the most out of their AdSense inventory. Harsh, yes – but true*.

* = I say true, but I lied. It isn’t always true. There are some legit techniques with SEO, but the majority is just basic stuff any decent designer does. There are great companies like SEOMoz who really understand some legit, above the belt techniques for SEO that do work. Most of the time though… be careful.

Seeing as how Google is the search engine, who does Google need to optimise for again?