Over-SEO'd sites to come under Google's axe

In an attempt to "level the playing field", Google will, in the weeks to come start penalizing sites that indulged ...

Anuradha Shetty|Mar 19, 2012, 18:00:13 IST

In an attempt to "level the playing field", Google will, in the weeks to come start penalizing sites that indulged heavily in search engine optimization techniques. The search engine giant, according to reports is working on, what it refers to as a search ranking penalty, looking out for those who overly optimized their sites in order to feature high on Google search, pushing down others with great content, in the process. According to a SearchEngineLand report, Google's Matt Cutts plans on introducing this penalty system into the search results, itself. The report states that Google is on the look out for those who engage heaviliy in SEOs - using too many key words, or exchanging too many links, among other things. As opposed to this, Google wants to put forth sites who work hard at achieving great content and build up a great site, as a consequence.

Quoting Cutts, a PCMag report stated that, "We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don't so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now." Google Raiders

Too much SEOing could get you into trouble

According to this report, Matt Cutts didn't intend to, but, accidentally leaked out the company's plans on coming down heavily on those heavily indulging in optmizing their sites for the search engine. Cutts was at this year's South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, when he accidentally let out details. Among other things, Cutts added that in addition to introducing this way of dealing with those who heavily optimize their websites, he aimed to make the Googlebot smarter and make their searches, itself, more relevant. Among the earliest penalties formulated by Google, as part of its run against heavily SEO'ed sites were sites that are top-heavy with advertisements (a common sight), by introducing a page layout algorithm. Among the first questions here would be how Google would penalize those found to be over-SEOing. Google has been, off late actively introducing improvements to their popular search function. Only recently reported about how Google searches would now throw up searches for questions, too, in addition to the key words, which it always responded to.