Google, undoubtedly the world’s most popular search engine is a useful tool for websites. It’s an even more useful tool for proclaimed SEO gurus – the sort of people who’re good at directing search queries to specific websites – all because of how they’re set up and optimised as opposed to the content the contain.
It works well for sites who can afford to pay to have their sites optimised for search spiders – but the little guys who often create content end up with little Google love.
That could be changing.
The company’s announced that it’s making some changes to how its search engine works – and that it’ll be penalising sites that are over-optimised or over SEO’d.
Here’s what Google’s Matt Cutts said about the changes at SxSW.
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.
I think this is a great move by the Google overlords; traffic should be generated by content, and not by how much money you can pay some self-important blowhard to direct it.
