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.

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

Take Care,
Nick