Will Your Site Be Flagged for Over Optimization?
The SEO industry exists mostly because of Google. Whether we SEO professionals love or love to hate the search behemoth, we all have jobs because of Google. Even whispers and rumors of an algorithm update can have a major impact in the SEO world, because the way we do our jobs is directly influenced by how Google does theirs. So when Matt Cutts, head of Google’s search spam team, announces that Google is working on a tweak to the algorithm that will punish sites that are too optimized for SEO, everyone gets a little jumpy. Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about the pending algorithm update at a SXSW panel a few weeks ago;
… the idea basically is to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all of those people who have sort of been doing…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 bit more level. And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website, the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that if people don’t do SEO we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area.
After news of the pending over optimization algorithm update hit the web the other week, a few of my clients wanted to know how this was going to affect their websites. Were their sites at risk of an over optimization penalty? I read a few more recaps of the panel discussion to get a better understanding of what exactly “over optimization” means to Google, and I told them that as long as their site has been practicing white hat SEO all along (which it definitely has since my company started managing it) then you are in no danger of being flagged for over optimization. Matt Cutts even admitted, “If you’re white hat or doing very little SEO, you’re not going to be affected by this change.”
This update is designed to help smaller, mom-and-pop websites that are producing great content and have user-friendly websites to perform better in the search engines, even if they don’t have the SEO budget to compete with the big brands. Personally, I think that’s great. There are plenty of smaller websites out there that do everything by the book when it comes to SEO, but they are blocked out of the SERPs because bigger brands can just dump money into their SEO campaigns. Giving these quality websites the opportunity to really make an impact in the search engines is long overdue.
Every since Google came out with the
7 Responses to “Will Your Site Be Flagged for Over Optimization?”
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Yes.It is true. People practicing white hat SEO techniques and promoting their clientele’s websites on a low budget, can get real benefits.
Another great post, Nick. Thanks for reminding people that making a great website geared toward helping and serving their customers is the foundation of smart SEO. No tricks, no voodoo – just good content, real links and believable social conversations. Cheers!
Thanks Marnie for reading and your comment!
Take Care,
Nick
Dear Nick,
Great article. Yes, you’re right, SEO will be dinosaurs without Google (and other search engines of course !)
The first time I heard about the ‘over optimization’ issue was from a podcast sent to me by a fellow SEO. It was an SXSW event.
Personally, if you are doing White Hat, you won’t be affected by the pending algorithm update.Keyword stuffing are considered black hat, that may fall under ‘over optimization’.
The intention of the update is acceptable. Even though you don’t have money to pay for an SEO firm, you can still compete with bigger budgeted campaign by just doing white hat SEO. Even though you have a ‘mom-and-pop’website, you can still be number 1 in SERPs. If you have good content and a campaign plan, page one rankings is not a dream.
Regards,
Engr Castro
PS Please allow me to retweet this. Tnx
Actually I dont think it is quite as straight forward as that.
First of all you need an agreed standard of what now constitutes “White Hat SEO” in Google’s eyes.
Besides the obvious of not using any form of cloaking, hidden text, or automated linking systems etc, there are lots of areas that are not so straight forward.
For example have you been trading links with other websites, Google may now consider this to be an attempt to manipulate PR. Have you been manually building links using your keywords as the anchor text for your links, (which of course almost everyone does, white hat, black hat or any other hat you like) Google now say that that is attempting to manipulate their results.
So before smugly thinking to yourself, “im ok ive only ever done White Hat SEO” take another look at where Google have moved the goal posts to….
Most small companies wouldnt have a clue about doing White Hat SEO, or even what it means, so if any SEO way required they would still need to pay a company or professional to do it for them.
But what exactly is currently acceptable as white hat is very unclear, Google have lost a little bit of control recently. For example their Adwords team have been giving advice that totally contradicts the advice given by their spam control team, there are even lawsuits starting up over this.
The lack of comunication within Google shows that it has got too big even for itself. They have forgotten that actually if it wasnt for us the website owns and the optimisation companies THEY wouldnt exist. They are trying to take over the rights to our work with their recent policy updates, and we seem to have forgotten that actually they are just a middle man between our websites and products and the internet users. Google are not the only option, perhaps we need to start looking elsewhere.
I think that many SEO companies are hoping that BING or another Search Engine will step up and take over from Google and bring them back down to earth with a bump.
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