Someone in the SEO community drew your attention to a section in Google’s new digital marketing training course that recommends writing content of at least 300 words, advises you to seed specific areas of your web pages with keywords, and targets keywords recommended a keyword density of less than 2%.

Several in the digital marketing community called Google on Twitter about the misinformation, and Google’s Danny Sullivan responded.

Google Digital Marketing & Ecommerce Certification

Google launched its Digital Marketing and Ecommerce certification on May 2, 2022. The purpose of our training courses and certifications is to help job seekers find jobs in digital marketing.

This training course is endorsed by the Advertising Agencies Association of America and the Advertising Federation of America.

Google’s digital marketing courses promise to help you master the following skills:

• Developing a digital marketing and e-commerce strategy
• Attract and engage customers through digital marketing channels such as search, social media and email
• Measure marketing analytics and share insights
• Build an e-commerce store, analyze e-commerce performance, and improve customer loyalty.”

The purpose of this program is to teach novice workers how to become proficient in entry-level digital marketing jobs.

But how can program graduates gain proficiency if what they learn isn’t right?

Google training courses recommend keyword density

In the third week of the course, in the section of the course called Digital Marketing Fundamentals, there is a section called Keyword Research and Keyword Stuffing.

In this particular section, Google’s training materials specify the maximum keyword density for your target keyword phrases.

Keyword density is a measure of how often a keyword appears on a web page expressed as a percentage.

Keyword density measurement shows that the keyword appeared X% times on the web page.

The original old search engine algorithms relied on keyword density as a way to identify page content. The more frequently a keyword appears on a page, the more likely the page is about that keyword phrase.

But search engines have moved on from that way of ranking keywords.

Or do you have

Google’s own training course makes an amazing statement about keyword density by recommending real keyword density limits.

The course states:

“Keep your keyword density below the industry standard of 2%.

This means that no more than 2% of the words on your webpage should be your target keywords. ”

Write at least 300 words

Another frowned upon recommendation is the minimum word count for web pages. This highlights that the more words a page has, the more likely it is to be ranked by Google.

The training course recommends:

“Write at least 300 words on your web page.

The more quality content you write, the more likely it is that your web page will rank higher on search engine result pages. ”

where to put keywords

The documentation also advises exactly where the keyword should be placed.

“Keywords must be used only once on each page in your website: in the page title, subheading, first paragraph, body conclusion.”

Did Google make a mistake?

Training courses are produced by Google and are not intended to contain confidential information.

The announcement of the Digital Marketing Certificate includes a statement that all information for the course is available in Google’s search document.

“This program does not contain confidential information. All the Google Search features taught are public and you can find out more details in the official Google Search documentation.”

The word count and keyword density recommendations are clearly not based on Google’s public documentation.

You also have to wonder how the recommendations for where to seed keywords within web pages came about.

If obvious mistakes like this can extend to the live version of the course, this mistake calls into question the credibility of this course.

Google Admits Inappropriate Information in Digital Marketing Training Course

Search Marketer Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) pointed out the error on twitter.

So… Connect GT (the largest and oldest Italian SEO forum founded by) @ Giorgio Tabe), Emanuele Ricci subscribes to the Digital Marketing & Ecommerce Certificate by Google on Coursera.
Seriously…”Write more than 300 characters”? and “keyword density”?
cc: @dannysullivan pic.twitter.com/7qdWKlJ1vs

— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) May 9, 2022

He also tweeted that this is an SEO myth and expressed his disappointment that introductory level courses in digital marketing misinform students.

Danny Sullivan clarified that the team that developed the training course had nothing to do with the search team and promised to pass on their feedback.

Danny murmured:

“I am not on the team that produced it, nor are they on the search team. You can ignore this. i’ll pass it on Here are some tips from searching. ”

The link Danny passed is to Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide. This is a comprehensive resource that covers a fair amount of SEO basics like title tags and meta descriptions.

Search for incorrect information

There is a lot of misinformation surrounding digital marketing. Finding search marketing myths in Google’s own digital marketing training courses is unexpected.