Google to Target Overly SEO'd Sites

From SeroundTable/March 16, 2012

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced as a side note during his panel at SXSW that Google is releasing an algorithm update specifically to target sites over doing their SEO.

Matt Cutts said this is Google's attempt to "level the playing field" between webmasters that build quality content versus webmasters who are just really aggressive SEOs.

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What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don't normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO - versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

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More in depth information was found on TopRankSolutions...

If you have been following our white hat SEO advice, you should not be too concerned about the upcoming assault on sites that focus on applying too many SEO techniques to a web site, rather than simply trying to build a site with quality content.

Although we don?t yet know exactly what Google plans to focus on, we can make an educated guess based on what Matt said. My main concern is that historically almost every time Google plans an all-out assault on some questionable practice, flaws in their algorithms (the spiders) end up penalizing thousands of sites for using similar but innocent tactics.

If you are doing any of the following with your web sites, you should probably be concerned about this update.

If you are using keyword stuffing (too many keywords on a page) in an attempt to raise your rank positions, your site will likely be a target. This is an old, outdated technique that rarely works today, yet some site owners still use it. Our advice is always to write the best informational content that you can. When writing an article, focus on your readers, but keep the search engines in mind while doing so. That simply means that you need to stay focused on your topic and avoid writing mediocre content.

If your link building has been overly aggressive, your site will probably become a target. Google has been notifying site owners with warnings about ?artificial linking patterns? through Google Webmaster Tools accounts for several months now. If you use Google Webmaster Tools and have been using a link building service, check your Webmaster Tools account for warning messages. The only warnings that we have heard about thus far have been for sites where link builders have added tens of thousands of poor quality backlinks. If you have accumulated thousands of backlinks from web sites in India, Indonesia and Malaysia, your site may be targeted.

Matt also warned about excessive link exchanges. Link exchanges have not worked very well for at least five years. It doesn?t hurt to do a few link exchanges, but they should only be done with sites within the segment of the market that a site focuses on. One-way, natural links are usually the best links.

I can also speculate that sites using black hat SEO methods, such as hidden text, hidden links or anything that is a violation of Google?s Webmaster Guidelines will be targeted.

The real important points here are that you should be focused on developing high quality informational content and should avoid doing anything excessively to promote your web site. Everything that you do to promote your web site with search engines should look natural. Listen to what Matt says: Sites that ?go well beyond what you normally expect? will be targeted.

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If you're not sure on how to best optimize your websites, perhaps you should take a few minutes and read an article about how to use the All-In-One Seo Plugin which should help you get on the right track.

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes :thumbsup:, but Google has always been driven to promote quality text content over trash, and it's actually really good to see them developing this further.

I've seen this first hand, with one of my clients increasing Google organic traffic since we boosted the word count per post. The fact is, most affiliates still copy, and those that do write their own content can barely write 200 words, let alone add appropriate keywords.

When someone writes 300 words, with subtle keyword use and genuinely compelling text, it's often going to beat the others.

It makes sense that Google would place a 300 - 500 word post about a scene higher than a post with only 200 words. As long as everything else is in order, text content is still king. :icon_mrgreen: