Google Is Planning To Penalize Overly Optimized Sites 299
tekgoblin writes "This is an interesting move by Google but not completely off the rocker for them. Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results. Google plans to penalize overly optimized sites because they want to level the playing field for other websites who do not concentrate on such efforts. From the article: 'Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains the following: “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.” The search engine at Google is about to go through a major overhaul and de-prioritizing sites with heavy SEO is just a small part in the big picture to bring better search results. The changes to the search engine will be coming in the next few months.'"
semantic web (Score:4, Interesting)
as the web becomes less semantic-based, html/css is slowly eroding in value as a searchable medium. for websites worth visiting, the default html structure that the googlebot loads is little more than a placeholder for dynamic content, with css styles used to declare javascript event listeners for a given element. clicking on said element loads the dynamic content.
people are finding things in different ways now: one example is via word-of-mouth (viral, etc) via social networks. who honestly thinks that fine tuning their website's keywords will help them obtain more visitors? does anyone actually believe this will help their website gain popularity? especially given the billions of webpages already in various search engines' databases? in this day and age?
as a web marketer, you are better off promoting a website through as many social networks as possible. dont waste time fine-tuning keywords; nobody cares anymore.
its about people helping people find information, not some algorithm helping you.
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
How about somebody mentioning to Google that we also don't want Google+ crap spamming our results...
I mentioned it to them in the "why are you doing this?" box when I deleted my Google+ account.
Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies that provide SEO tend to work for a monthly retainer, not as one-off payments. I doubt many of them will like this because it eliminates one of the things that differentiates their service from simply "build a good site and add good content". The people who don't "over-optimise" make more money by simply doing a good job of building websites, and they have no need to define themselves as SEO companies.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
The best way to do this is a catch 22. In order to gain better search results you have to give up search privacy. Using Google 'manage blocked sites' you can start killing off those SEO sites that crud up you search results one by one, catch is you must be logged in.
Google can of course compile those blocked sites, sites that users have decided to permanently toss in the search waste bin and start putting those sites further and further down the results list (associated with broad users types).
Google can even publicly shame offending sites by publishing lists of the most blocked web sites, really sticking it to the SEOs who get carried away with crapping up search results.
To get really good search results, search companies just need to provide the core, the starting point and then allow logged in registered users (no privacy, suggestion here use 2 search engines, one for private and one for public searches) as a distributed effort to rate good and bad results, for general rankings and specific user type rankings
Penalize? I don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't sound to me like they're trying to penalize anyone; it sounds to me like they're trying to improve their search results. The people who spend so much time and effort trying to artificially boost their rankings may feel like they're being penalized, but that doesn't mean they are. You might as well say that a thief forced to return the goods he stole is being penalized for the value of those goods. While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
I searched for "how to sing" not one Google + result and I went in 6 pages.
I'm also not a Google + member (none of the social sites) but that shouldn't matter.
I log in to my Youtube account anytime I need to do anything, then log out. I have one video that's seeing 50000 views a week
and the info on people (those who have logged in or never log out) is quite interesting; allowing one to specialize their spam
BTW: The video mentioned is on a different account, 5 seconds long, and nobody likes it, but it's doing rather well
Not one item of spam, not even a link to my other site have I placed (outside of the description).
-Citation: youtube search for "How to get a Mob Spawner" by badactorEP, I've left the basic statistics open.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's hope (Score:2, Interesting)
I manage around 350 sites. Daily I get calls from Seo companies that claim to have a "relationship" with Google. I fight tooth and nail to have our mantra be "when someone clicks a link in search, they aren't sorry they arrived at one of our sites" It is disheartening when we are evaluating our search results that we find the first page littered with sites that are keyword packed. with 100's of back links from sites who's only reason for existence is for seo. I hope Google is serious about this. Good, relevant content and a well designed site should trump everything else. Don't get me started on the "cherry pick" and automated review services like Demand Force" That is another thing Google needs to get on their radar.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont' *have* a google account, yet, every once in a while, I get "personal results", and pictures of people I know who have google accounts. That's scary!
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW the block sites stuff doesn't appear to work well for me any more. I did this: go to google trends, pick two unrelated trending keywords/phrases, search for them. Click on spam site, click back, block the spam site. Repeat. Go to manage blocked sites, no sites show up- this is even when I'm signed in to Google.
FWIW Google could use a similar method to automatically block such spam sites (there would need to be some checks but some of these sites are so obviously spam that even a simple program should be able to figure it out.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
"I prfer yahoo for real mail"
Baffling, it really is. I have a yahoo account I don't use for anything, not spam crap, not anything. It gets several hundred spam a day that fly past the filter.