This article was published on Mar 30th, 2012
I don’t know if you remember but in the days of infoseek and altavista which were THE search engines before Google announced itself to the world, it was possibly to surge to the top of the serps (Search Engine Results Page) by just modifying content, adding a few keywords etc…
Soon, everyone in the then bludgeoning online world realized what that meant and thus heralded in the world of keywords stacking (stuffing) etc…
Both Infoseek and Altavista have gone now, but the spammers are still hard at work, making it more and more difficult for the more “traditional” (read honest if you must) to compete.
And the search engines have had to counter the effects of those spammers by adopting counter measures even if they went against their initial company policy. After all it was that long ago the Google cofounder Sergey Bin declared:
Google’s slightly different in that we never ban anybody, and we don’t really believe in spam in the sense that there’s no mechanism for removing people from our index. The fundamental concept we use is, you know, is this page relevant to the search? And, you know, some pages which, you know, they may almost never appear on the search results page because they’re just not that relevant.
That was in 1999, a life time away for any internet professional. Today, Google has an entire page devoted to what it considers spam and one quick glance at it will make you think of the leaking hose we all have in our garden that you are trying in vain to patch up.
The problem with these “patches” is that it has broad implications for users who had not intention of spamming at all. If you have a page that is made of images exclusively for example, you might be tempted to insert hidden text so as to give Google an indication as to the nature of your page and yet, this innocent measure might very well result in a ban by Google.
Another example of a Google patch that may penalize you? Affiliate link. Say you write a blog about online marketing, you might think it a good idea to place a link to a product you think your audience will benefit from inside an article in your blog, but once again, this could land you in trouble. We know that Google can detect and deal with affiliate links by discounting their relevancy in their famed “algorithm”. Do that consistently and you run the risk of being catalogued as a link farm, and trust me, no-one who depends on organic searches for traffic would ever want to be catalogued as such!
For a the past few years, the motto in the SEO industry has been: Content is King! And it made a lot of sense. Write a quality article that gives real information to an audience, and Google (and other search engines) will love you for it.
That was then! After last year’s Panda’s Update seemingly good quality articles which had at the top of the SERPS simply vanished overnight. The official murmur from Google was that there were at least 23 questions that needed answered by all of us before determining if our articles were good quality or not. The implications being that if we wrote our articles with these 23 considerations in mind, then for all intents and purposes our article would be considered good quality content.
Sounds fair doesn’t it? Yes but more and more internet marketers are now sounding their discontent by saying that when if comes to quality content, “Google knows poor quality when it sees it.” In other words, write it and hope for the best!
What about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Google uses a whole array of different factors to determine why a page should rank better than another for specific keywords. Google who never give much of anything out in the open anyway did release an “SEO” PDF guide.
And then came this gem from one Matt Cutts, Google Spam Chief:
All those people who have sort of 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 bit more level.
I hope that you “sort of” understand what Matt means by “over optimization” because not everybody does!
What’s the bottom line? First you could read what Vanessa FOs has to say about Google’s Upcoming Algorithm Change: “Over-Optimized Sites” where she reminds us that at the end of the day, Google is on the look out for the “super” spammers, rather than those of us who specialize in SEO:
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 are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area.
There… Now we understand!