Google: We Suck At SEO. Badly.

Article says the first Google result when you google "search engine" is 5th place.

For the same search, Yahoo places itself as #1 and Google #2.

Bing's takes the old school award: #1 is Dogpile, #5 is Altavista. None of the big boys from today are in the top ten, not even Bing themselves. I like that, its like they've got a small ego.

The reason this has been low on their priority list is that their organic SEO is amazing. Have you ever searched for a Google product and not found it on the first try?

Google is the one company in the world for which SEO doesn't matter, because they can change the rules at any time. A query for "google finance" that doesn't bring up google.com/finance as the first hit will be recognized by all internal search engineers as broken, and relative weights of signals (and hence rankings) will be changed accordingly. A little uptweak on organic SEO plus a little downtweak on premeditated SEO and voila.

This isn't even wrong, it's just the way it is.

There's a helpful slideshow (viewable as one page) of Google's many mistakes.