This is going to be another disruption for many websites owners who paid a handsome sum to SEO companies. Google’s Matt Cutts just announced that Google is working on an update to their algorithm to penalize websites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.”
This is what he said,
We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. 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. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.
In other words, websites that tries to rank high by gaming Google’s algorithm will be penalized. Websites that don’t try too hard in doing SEO and worked hard instead to produce great content will be rewarded.
This makes a lot of sense really. Google’s business model relies on leading people to great and relevant content through their search engine. The day they stop doing that is the day their business goes in decline. The problem with many SEO techniques is that at best, they do nothing to improve on the quality of content; at worst, they fill the Internet with junk content.
Last year, Google’s Panda update was the first major shot in Google’s war against junk content on the Internet. The result was that many top-ranking websites got shot down like lightening. Many websites’ business models got smashed because they rely solely on high ranking to derive their revenue.
Google declined to give more details at this stage. We can see this is going to cause a lot of angst for SEO companies. With this upcoming change, many unwitting website owners are going to literally pay (to bad SEO companies) to get penalized.
