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.'"

Comments

Good

[heypete]

Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.

Re:Good

[davester666]

How about somebody mentioning to Google that we also don't want Google+ crap spamming our results...

We shouldn't have to hit page 2 before we start getting useful results.

Re:Good

[green1]

It used to be that good content was what search engines were looking for. And by producing good (and well organized) content you automatically ended up at the top of the search rankings.
Unfortunately search bots don't actually know what "good content" is, so all they can do is try to work with the bits that they can figure out, and that led to SEO which really ONLY exists to game those algorithms.
This is a good move on google's part. I think one of the big failings of all search engines recently is that they have mostly been accepting SEO rather than fighting it. This leads to lots of garbage sites with good SEO grabbing all the top spots, and makes it very difficult to find really good sites. The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better, I long for a day when the only way to do SEO has the side effect of having to make useful information for human visitors too...

Re:Good

[buchner.johannes]

Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.

Surely the reaction to this will be producing good content, and not employing more SEO gurus to circumvent the new weights by dodgy techniques.

Re:Good

[slimjim8094]

See the globe next to the person icon, the one that says "Hide personal results"?

Re:Good

[green1]

If I had mod points this would be +1 Funny...
SEO is the business of circumventing the proper weighting of search results by "dodgy techniques", it always has been, and always will be.
SEO didn't exist until people realized that bots had specific things they were looking for, and people started putting only those things in instead of writing good content that happened to include those things (what the bot writers originally assumed would be found)
I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.

Re:Good

[buchner.johannes]

I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.

The core of the problem is really that people don't want to hear that their site/content is not relevant on a search term, because for them it is relevant. So they will search for ways of "correcting" this picture, and demand creates supply.

Re:Good

[rtb61]

The best way to do this is a catch 22. In order to gain better search results you have to give up search privacy. Using Google 'manage blocked sites' you can start killing off those SEO sites that crud up you search results one by one, catch is you must be logged in.

Google can of course compile those blocked sites, sites that users have decided to permanently toss in the search waste bin and start putting those sites further and further down the results list (associated with broad users types).

Google can even publicly shame offending sites by publishing lists of the most blocked web sites, really sticking it to the SEOs who get carried away with crapping up search results.

To get really good search results, search companies just need to provide the core, the starting point and then allow logged in registered users (no privacy, suggestion here use 2 search engines, one for private and one for public searches) as a distributed effort to rate good and bad results, for general rankings and specific user type rankings

Re:Good

[Anthony Mouse]

I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.

I can propose a tactic that might work pretty well: Whenever Google figures out the latest spamming method the SEO people are using, make a list of all the sites that currently do that (ideally in the way that only or primarily the SEO people are doing it), and then give all those sites a long-term decrease in ranking, even if they stop doing that thing. Make it two years before you can get your site back into the higher rankings.

Soon enough everybody will realize that "get SEO" is a synonym for "get your site removed from the first page of results for the next two years" and then finding methods of fooling the Googlebot in the short-term won't matter anymore because no one will be willing to attempt it if they can get slapped with a long-term penalty.

Re:Good

[datavirtue]

Not really, now that people have been gaming the system those with good content now have to practice SEO to stay afloat/visible.

Re:Good

[Armakuni]

The first thing I will do then is buy a number of spammy links to be sent to my competitor's otherwise entirely white-hat site that currently ranks in 1st, thus making sure his excellent site never troubles me again. Meanwhile, he's too honest to do the same to my site, so I benefit. This is called negative SEO and is not new. It's the reason Google haven't done what you suggest.

Re:Good

[Trax3001BBS]

You folks logged in when you use Google? I never log in and I never get Google + results. Testing this just now
I searched for "how to sing" not one Google + result and I went in 6 pages.

I'm also not a Google + member (none of the social sites) but that shouldn't matter.

I log in to my Youtube account anytime I need to do anything, then log out. I have one video that's seeing 50000 views a week
and the info on people (those who have logged in or never log out) is quite interesting; allowing one to specialize their spam

BTW: The video mentioned is on a different account, 5 seconds long, and nobody likes it, but it's doing rather well :}}.
Not one item of spam, not even a link to my other site have I placed (outside of the description).
-Citation: youtube search for "How to get a Mob Spawner" by badactorEP, I've left the basic statistics open.

Re:Good

[symbolset]

The horror! Have you sought counselling for the trauma? Are you finding the injury disabling?

Re:Good

[Ihmhi]

And on top of that, when you're signed in they have that whole useful "never see links from this site again". If you type in $BAND $SONG lyrics, you're bound to get sites that use shitty flash apps, annoying ads, etc. They are erased from my personal search results, and now I only see relevant ones.

Re:Good

[hobarrera]

I dont' *have* a google account, yet, every once in a while, I get "personal results", and pictures of people I know who have google accounts. That's scary!

Not a very good wingman...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

content not ads

[chrismcb]

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.

Oh this is too good.

[chr1st1anSoldier]

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.

I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[Molt]

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.

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[Bogtha]

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.

Companies that provide SEO tend to work for a monthly retainer, not as one-off payments. I doubt many of them will like this because it eliminates one of the things that differentiates their service from simply "build a good site and add good content". The people who don't "over-optimise" make more money by simply doing a good job of building websites, and they have no need to define themselves as SEO companies.

semantic web

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Penalize? I don't think so.

[Xtifr]

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.

Old SEO joke

[s7uar7]

How many SEO experts does it take to change a light bulb, lightbulb, light,bulb, lamp, lighting, light switch, lightswitch, switch, energy?

Let's start with TekGoblin

[afabbro]

Seriously, why not link the source instead of some spammy blog?