Google has updated its guidance on identifying and reporting unethical SEO practices. The document lists warning signs, recommends filing FTC complaints against practitioners who engage in them and suggests that checking a consultant's advice against official Google guidance is a useful quality filter.
There is a lot to unpack here. Most of it is unintentionally revealing.
PageRank sculpting
The guidance lists PageRank sculpting as a shady practice to watch for. PageRank sculpting — the practice of using noindex directives or rel="nofollow" on internal links to concentrate link equity toward priority pages — peaked as a tactic around 2008 to 2010. Google changed how PageRank flowed through pages in 2009 and the practice became largely pointless. Matt Cutts discussed it on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Sixteen years ago.
Its appearance in 2026 guidance intended to help consumers identify dodgy practitioners raises a straightforward question: who wrote this document and when did they last actively work in search? It sits alongside a warning about "guaranteed number one rankings" — a red flag that has been in every SEO consumer guide since approximately 2004 — as if the landscape being described has not changed in a generation.
PageRank sculpting — A link equity manipulation technique from circa 2008, rendered largely ineffective by Google's 2009 algorithm update. Its appearance in 2026 consumer guidance suggests the document was written by someone whose working knowledge of SEO has a fifteen-year lag. It stopped working when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister. Although you could also argue, like Labour, that it was never really working either.
Third-party metrics and the opacity problem
The guidance warns against SEOs who "rely on third-party metrics not used by Google" — specifically citing Domain Authority type scores as indicators of dubious practice.
This is accurate as far as it goes. Domain Authority is a Moz metric. Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric. Neither is a Google signal. SEOs who report these as if they were direct indicators of Google performance are either confused or misleading their clients.
But the guidance omits the reason these metrics exist at all. Google does not publish its authority signals. PageRank is no longer publicly visible. The link signals Google uses internally are not disclosed. Domain Authority and its equivalents are proxies built by tool vendors to fill the gap left by Google's deliberate opacity — proxies that exist because the alternative is no external signal at all.
Calling out reliance on third-party proxies without acknowledging that Google's own opacity created the market for them is, at minimum, an interesting editorial choice. It also conveniently positions Google as the sole legitimate authority on what signals matter — which is consistent with the pattern Dixon Jones identified in Google's AI optimisation guide: keep playing our game on our terms.
Ranking number one
The guidance flags "guaranteed ranking number one" as a classic red flag. It is. No reputable practitioner guarantees a specific ranking position because no reputable practitioner controls Google's algorithm.
What the guidance does not address is that "ranking number one" is a phrase that appears in Google's own documentation, in Google's own automated recommendations within Google Search Console and in the framing used by the SEO tools industry — Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs — that Google does not appear to have any plans to call out in the same breath.
Ranking for what query. On what device. In what location. For which user. On which day. With or without AI Overviews above it. With or without a featured snippet. The "number one ranking" that a tool reports and the commercial outcome it produces are not the same thing and have never been the same thing. The perpetuation of that framing by the tools industry is a separate consumer protection problem that this guidance does not touch.
Check against official Google guidance
The document recommends using official Google guidance as a benchmark for evaluating SEO advice. Follow Google's documentation, compare what your SEO is telling you against what Google says, flag discrepancies.
This would be more useful advice if official Google guidance were internally consistent. It is not. Google's public position on llms.txt is that it does not use it and has no plans to. Google's Lighthouse tool audits for llms.txt implementation by default. Google's AI optimisation guide recommends checking against official guidance while omitting MCP — the dominant agentic interoperability standard outside Google's ecosystem — entirely.
If consumers followed the advice to check SEO guidance against Google's official documentation, they would encounter a document base that contradicts itself, changes without notice and is — as Dixon Jones documented before his article disappeared — strategically coherent for Google in ways that are not always coherent for publishers.
Who enforces this, and where
The mechanism for reporting is an FTC complaint. The FTC is a United States federal agency. Its jurisdiction is the United States.
An agency in the UK, Europe, Australia or anywhere outside the US engaging in the practices described is not meaningfully reachable through an FTC complaint. The guidance presents a US enforcement mechanism as if it were a global consumer protection tool. It is not. Outside the US it is decorative.
There is also a more uncomfortable dynamic. The FTC complaint mechanism will be used — as these mechanisms always are — by well-resourced practitioners to file complaints against competitors. A sole trader receiving an FTC complaint cannot absorb the administrative response burden that a larger agency can. The weight of the process falls differently depending on what you have behind you. The same pattern as every compliance mechanism discussed on this site.
What the guidance is actually for
The legitimate purpose of this kind of guidance is real. Consumers who do not understand SEO are genuinely vulnerable to practitioners who charge for guaranteed results, buy links in bulk, stuff keywords into pages and disappear when the penalties arrive. That problem exists and it causes real harm.
The document would be more useful if it were current, internally consistent and honest about the limitations of its own enforcement mechanism. PageRank sculpting. Checking against guidance that contradicts itself. An FTC complaint route that stops at the US border.
Bigmouth strikes again. And the irony is that most of the legitimate practitioners this guidance is meant to protect consumers toward already know that Domain Authority is not a Google metric, that no one can guarantee a ranking and that PageRank sculpting stopped working when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister — although you could also argue, like Labour, that it was never really working either.