At a recent SWSX session titled “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!” with Duane Forrester of BING, Matt Cutts from Google’s Spam Team appears to announce a new penalty to “over-optimized” sites.
A questioner asked if Google was doing anything about the situation where a “Mom & Pop” website is being outranked by less relevant but more extensively SEO’d sites.
Here is Matt’s response:
What’s interesting about your question is you went a little bit deeper, and you said, “What about all the people who are sort of optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO?” And normally we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working on in the last few months, and hopefully in the next couple months or so, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it. And the idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit.
So all those people who have sort have been doing, for lack of a better word, “over-optimization,” or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.
And so that’s the sort of thing where we try make the GoogleBot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so if people don’t do SEO, we handle that. And we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on a page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. And so that is something where we continue to pay attention, and we continue to work on it. And it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that.
So what is over optimization?
As far as SEO goes the old adage, if it looks like shit and smells like shit, it is probably shit. While I am sure Matt’s new algorithm will take many things into account, based on the rest of his comments, Google appears to be focusing on a few areas.
First the bad:
· Buying links
· Too many non-relevant links in content
· Too many keywords
The Good:
· To engage in social media
· Relevant content
To summarize, no SEO person can guarantee search results, but they can increase your chances. Duane Forrester of BING says an SEO expert is like a coach, someone that helps you present yourself. And we know how far a good coach can take you.
About the author:
David Crockenberg is the owner of DEC Systems LLC and DEC Web Marketing, which specialize in custom website design and search engine marketing. You can follow DEC Systems on Facebook and subscribe to David’s blog to get updates on what’s new in search engine optimization, and marketing.