Webtivity Internet Marketing Blog

3% of Searches Affected

The Google Search Blog has confirmed the “over-optimization” penalty has been factored into the Google search algorithm and made live.  They are calling it the “webspam algorithm update”.  Google estimates these latest changes will affect approximately 3.1% of English websites.  In comparison, their initial Panda update in February, 2011 affected over 12% of search results.

So what constitutes “over-optimization”?  Simply put, all the things we’ve been telling you not to engage in!

Keyword Stuffing
This is the practice of stuffing a bunch of keywords into your website content and Meta tags.  You’ve likely come across a website that the text was almost nonsensical because they kept repeating the same word or phrase incessantly.   Or maybe you were reading through a paragraph and a completely unrelated phrase was injected in the middle of the content and linked to another website.  These are the types of tactics Google is attacking with this update.

Text Spinning
For those who don’t want to take the time writing unique, engaging content for their websites or blogs, they use “text spinning” software.  Basically you copy and paste a blog post or web page content into the software, and it “spins” it and tries to output a rewritten version of that content.  Some of the programs work pretty well, but if you read the content closely there are idiosyncrasies in grammar you will come across.  It is those idiosyncrasies Google is looking to identify.

As is almost always the case in technology, taking shortcuts may show short-term benefits but almost always result in long-term disappointments.  The 3% of search results that have been impacted by the latest changes by Google probably wish they had spent all their resources doing all the things Google tells you, because now they are going to be forced to!

New Changes Rolling Out

The forums and Blogs blew up earlier this week when suddenly rankings started to drop and some websites even dropped completely out of the Google index.  A lot is still speculation, but here is what we know so far.

Google rolled out a new Panda update at the end of March which continued to target one of the methodologies SEO companies have been using to get cheap links: Blog networks.   This is the practice of setting up a network of low-quality Blogs on various topics and then promoting your clients on the Blogs and linking over to their websites.  If your SEO company is using this practice to rank your website you may have a surprise in store for you.  And the problem with this tactic is that the links they are building for their customers are temporary.  When their clients stop paying them, they remove all the links from their Blogs and then their clients are back to where they started.  Your SEO company should be building permanent links for you—that’s good marketing budget you’re spending with them!

Besides that, Matt Cutts of Google recently announced they are working on penalizing websites that are “over-optimized”.

At the SXSW Conference, Matt said, “What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. 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.”

This basically falls into the category of just plain old bad SEO practices.  Tactics like stuffing too many keywords/phrases into your content and Meta tags, and building ridiculous amounts of links in a short amount of time, for example.  Things that just don’t look “natural”.  Google is also continuing to place more and more importance on active participation on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Unfortunately sometimes good people get caught up in algorithm changes too, but eventually Google seems to swing back around and make it right.

So it goes back to everything we coach our clients on: build great content on your website, be active in social media, and do things the right way and you will be rewarded.  Play the shortcut game, and eventually you will get Google-slapped!