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Google Is Planning To Penalize Overly Optimized Sites
tekgoblin writes "This is an interesting move by Google but not completely off the rocker for them. Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results. Google plans to penalize overly optimized sites because they want to level the playing field for other websites who do not concentrate on such efforts. From the article: 'Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains the following: “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.” The search engine at Google is about to go through a major overhaul and de-prioritizing sites with heavy SEO is just a small part in the big picture to bring better search results. The changes to the search engine will be coming in the next few months.'"
Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.
Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results
So now Google is officially a co.cc blocker.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
People want to find the best content, not the best ads. But they shouldn't be penalizing people who have "good seo" such as decent keyword lists. Rather they should be penalizing people with poor content.
HAHAHAHAHA! I love this! The company I work for makes every employee write blog articles and in turns makes our sales team write eight comments a month on those blog artles for the sole purpose of increasing their google standing in search results. You have no idea how much this makes me smile.
All this is doing is changing the rules on which sites will be rated more highly, this changes what needs to be done to a site to gain artificially high ranking- maybe making it more difficult- but it'll still be done. I can imagine the SEO service sellers being delighted about this, new customers will still be buying their services to gain ranks and since old approaches will now be penalised they can start to sell again to those who'd bought their services before the change.
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as the web becomes less semantic-based, html/css is slowly eroding in value as a searchable medium. for websites worth visiting, the default html structure that the googlebot loads is little more than a placeholder for dynamic content, with css styles used to declare javascript event listeners for a given element. clicking on said element loads the dynamic content.
people are finding things in different ways now: one example is via word-of-mouth (viral, etc) via social networks. who honestly thinks that fine tuning their website's keywords will help them obtain more visitors? does anyone actually believe this will help their website gain popularity? especially given the billions of webpages already in various search engines' databases? in this day and age?
as a web marketer, you are better off promoting a website through as many social networks as possible. dont waste time fine-tuning keywords; nobody cares anymore.
its about people helping people find information, not some algorithm helping you.
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Table-ized A.I.
As someone who provides SEO, among other things - shameless plug alert: www.uvmanagement.com - I see this as being a welcome change.
It is frustrating trying to provide what I deem "honest" SEO - focusing on marketing the content, rather than creating content which is marketable, for example - when so many other providers out there use all the tricks in the book to increase page rankings without actually having content worthy of where they end up. I very well could engage in such tactics, but I'm a nerd before I'm a businessman, and I'm not particularly happy with how "cluttered" the web has become over the past decade as more and more people have learned how to exploit holes in its system.
It can be incredibly frustrating trying to find something on Google (or any other engine), when the first several pages are filled with worthless or ultimately irrelevant links.
I know. There's this one scumbag SEO company that comes up for an absolute load of unrelated terms, it's that obvious, I don't know why Google haven't blacklisted them yet. The SEO company even has a silly name, Wiki something I think.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It doesn't sound to me like they're trying to penalize anyone; it sounds to me like they're trying to improve their search results. The people who spend so much time and effort trying to artificially boost their rankings may feel like they're being penalized, but that doesn't mean they are. You might as well say that a thief forced to return the goods he stole is being penalized for the value of those goods. While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.
A lot of the SEO sites have very low actual value in them. They are avoided by any humans with 10% of a brain.
This dilutes Google's actual value as a search engine.
If they change how sites are rated to raise usable content-rich sites, then people are more likely to view the site and maybe actually click on an ad and maybe buy something.
Because we know, deep down, you are really seeking a larger penis. Its the basis of all human endeavor.
I have always hated SEO with a deep passion.
I despise the SEO marketing idiots who glamorise themselves with "arcane knowledge". They end up using basic tools that any illiterate monkey could. Knowledge that could be written out on a 2 pages, in a big font.
They act like Chiropractors, alternative medicine quacks and ponzi fraudsters. Wizard of Oz stuff, "Ignore the man behind the curtain". They all get caught out, simply because what they espouse is rubbish.
The sooner Google allows the entire internet population to have a "This Is SEO Bullshit" button, the better.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
How many SEO experts does it take to change a light bulb, lightbulb, light,bulb, lamp, lighting, light switch, lightswitch, switch, energy?
This may be about moving ads to Google properties. With AdSense ads, Google has to share revenue. With ads on Google's own pages, they don't. Google is putting more ads on their own search result pages now, and adding their "social" (i.e. brand related) results at the right. Look up "cars" and you now get "People and Pages on Google+ related to cars", which are Ford, Nissan (with logos) and "cars.com".
Google has been trying to drive traffic to their own properties for a while, and the pressure is increasing. Top results for popular searches are increasingly Google's own content, or something they scraped from somewhere else. (You can stop Google from scraping your site. The price is total disappearance from Google searches. News Corp. did that for some of their newspapers. Few others dare.) "Videos" as a search option has been replaced by "YouTube". And, of course, there's "Google+"
Anything Matt Cutts says about "cracking down on SEO" has to be viewed with skepticism. He's Google's promoter to the SEO community. He speaks at the big SEO conferences. His position is "SEO is not spam.
About two months ago I was searching for something, and I remember being annoyed enough with the results that google was posting to go try searching on Bing *shudder*
The problem was, despite using quotes, google was not searching the exact term I had entered. It was two months ago so I don't remember the exact term, but the problem was of the nature where it was modifying the end of the word. In that case it was making a significant enough change that I wasn't remotely finding what I wanted, despite the quotes.
I think in the near future google is going to start to find out they're not immortal. They've really been going downhill..
Another big annoyance is a removal of the timeline from the news archive searches. I used to find that extremely useful. You could easily search for a term, then narrow down the date visually by clicking the year, then the month.
Now you've just got raw results that you can only sort ascending or descending, but you've got no idea where clumps of stories may occur or anything like that.
Seriously, why not link the source instead of some spammy blog?
Advice: on VPS providers
I manage around 350 sites. Daily I get calls from Seo companies that claim to have a "relationship" with Google. I fight tooth and nail to have our mantra be "when someone clicks a link in search, they aren't sorry they arrived at one of our sites" It is disheartening when we are evaluating our search results that we find the first page littered with sites that are keyword packed. with 100's of back links from sites who's only reason for existence is for seo. I hope Google is serious about this. Good, relevant content and a well designed site should trump everything else. Don't get me started on the "cherry pick" and automated review services like Demand Force" That is another thing Google needs to get on their radar.