This article was published on Apr 4th, 2012

It’s never a dull moment in the world of Internet Marketing.  As things stand, there are several parties involved in the ongoing battle of the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

  • Google
  • The Spammers
  • The rest of us which can be further sub-categorized into
    • Those of us who have a fair understanding of what SEO is.
      • … and use our skills as a service to others
      • … or to promote our own sites
    • Those of us are just starting out in this endeavor

Whatever group you happen to be in, you could say that on one hand you have Google and on the other, the rest of us!  (And tough luck if we happen NOT to be spammers).

Something “interesting” happened a couple of weeks ago at a SXSW event during which Matt Cutts, (Google Spam Chief) introduced the “over-optimization” algorithm launch targeting the spammers, those who voluntarily and deliberately try to NOT play by the rule in order to ascend quickly the dizzying summits of the search engine ranking.

Here is a transcript of some of what Matt had to say:

The idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So 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.

So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that 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 whatever they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of going beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now…

Absolutely there are some people who take it too far [ talking about the positives of SEO].

What we’re mindful of is when someone says, “We’re White Hat. We continue to do the right thing, and we see the Black Hats who are over-optimizing or going too far, and they seem to be doing too well.”

So we’ve been working on changes to try to make sure that if you are a White Hat or if you’ve been doing very little SEO you are going to not be affected by this change. But if you’ve been going way far beyond the pale, then that’s the sort of thing where your site might not rank as highly as it did before.”

For a lot of us, this statement has left us scratching our heads.  Does this mean that if we include search engine optimization strategies for our own online business, we risk being targeted by Google and therefore become the victim of their Over-Optimization Penalty?

The answer has to be:  QUITE POSSIBLY!  And some should worry more than others!

The problem with SEO is that its purpose is to employ techniques designed to bring more traffic to a site.  This in itself is in opposition to Google’s main purpose, or “raison d’etre” which is to crawl through millions of pages every day, index them, and decide which ones are worthy of being ranked high or not.

As such when anyone designs a campaign aimed at circumventing this fact, that person places her/himself in the grey zone between what is acceptable behavior and what is not.

Is this an acceptable risk?  Not if one day you wake up to discover that those keywords you have worked so hard at promoting have all of a sudden disappeared from the SERPS taking down with them most of your income.

So what is wise SEO person supposed to do?

To continue to write as good quality content as possible, without worrying about keyword density, linking practices etc…