Greenguy's Board - Google begins penalizing search 'over-optimization'

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Google begins penalizing search 'over-optimization'

Saw this today off of one of my RSS feeds.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1166...#lsrc.rss_main

Quote:

Google is making a change to its search algorithm to penalize what the company’s head of Web spam called “over-optimization” and instead favor websites with high-quality content and less refined search-engine optimization.

Google announced Tuesday that a change in its search algorithm will punish sites that violate the company’s “existing quality guidelines” and is intended to reward those “making great sites for users, not just algorithms.” The change will go live over the next few days, the company said.

Specifically, the changes aim to reduce the amount of content that surfaces high in a user’s search results on Google but that is not particularly useful or valuable; this is also known as Web spam.

Matt Cutts, the company’s Web spam chief, first mentioned the plan at the SXSW Interactive conference in March.

Cutts said the algorithm would assess whether websites “throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area.”

Google has since backed away from Cutts’ description of the problem as “over-optimization.” The company emphasizes in Tuesday’s announcement that the algorithm shift will target only those practices, such as “keyword stuffing” and “link schemes,” that violate its guidelines.

However, the announcement included the caveat that not all content punished by the changes will “be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise.”

The shift to Google’s algorithm is likely to affect, at least initially, some websites that aren’t clearly violating its guidelines, according to a strategy paper for Web marketers released earlier this month by the search-engine marketing firm iProspect.

“Based on experiences with Panda and virtually all large algorithm shifts, we do expect sites that don’t appear to fit the description of the intended target to nevertheless be caught up in initial sweeps,” the iProspect paper said. Panda was a significant change in Google’s search algorithm, launched in February 2011, that also aimed to boost the rankings of high-quality sites.

However, “subsequent adjustments and tweaks” will likely restore those users’ rankings, iProspect indicated.

Google did not provide specifics about how the algorithm will differentiate useful content from Web spam, saying that doing so would “give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users.”

The company says the changes will affect about 3 percent of search queries.

I've heard about this as well - was thinking about making some sites that have no SEO on them to see what happens :)

That's another 10 million jobs down the drain then...

Not necessarily - I might open a company called de-seo.com or noseo.com and you can pay me to un seo your site :)

Well this kinda blows.
http://www.howling-wulf.com/pics/ouch.jpg
All hand-written blog posts.

Howling, thats what Panda did to my network. All front page or #1 listings for years disappeared. It more then kinda blows...it sucks major. I have been patient to see if things swing back, hopefully this update will start to move some things back to the front again.

Welcome to August 2007 for me :(

Quote:

Originally Posted by dunc (Post 515669)

Not necessarily - I might open a company called de-seo.com or noseo.com and you can pay me to un seo your site :)

Damn - beaten to it: negativeseo.me

That looks a lot like a most of my mainstream sites during the Panda update Howling - I checked most things and came to the conclusion that it was same/similar repetitive backlink keywords which penalized me.

"http://www.fetishbank.net/links/fetishbank-out-00.html: PR changed from 2 to 3."

Timely ! Got this half an hour ago. Pure example of non-seo url !

Less than one month ago I was thinking to map this url (and all the other internal pages) to make them looking like http://outdoors.fetishbank.net/ ! Useless and dangeorus indeed !

My less than a month old blog, floridaoutdooradventures.info, just got a PR of 2.

Some pr1 got 1up and some pr2 went down by 1, so no change for me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dunc (Post 515905)

This is funny

no more outsourcing then :)

I just checked out the PR on a lot of my pages - almost every one I checked that had a PR0 is now PR2.

I am convinced Google is just handing out PR now :)

A couple years back I had PR0's and PR1's on page one or even in the number one spot while the couple pr4's and few 3's I had were on page 3 and further back so I stopped caring about it and haven't looked since it did not seem to mean a damn thing.

You know something is wrong when interior pages have a higher PR than the index :D

Another punishment for "trick sites". From this moment I will do only on websites with own content (free sites and picture galleries as I'm not into a tubes) and good interlinking. That's all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pc (Post 516142)

this is interesting : http://www.webpronews.com/google-pen...eators-2012-05

Intersting article and also interesting to read the posted comments on it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cleo (Post 516149)

Intersting article and also interesting to read the posted comments on it.

I don't think the Panda update is anywhere near complete. Lots of tweaking. If not G is going to lose a lot of relevance since their serps are irrelevant right now.

Google results have become more and more geared to their profit rather than relevancy. I think at some point the government is going to step in for antitrust.

Either that or Goggle is going to become self-aware and enslave us as it turns us into batteries.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cleo (Post 516154)

.
...
Either that or Goggle is going to become self-aware and enslave us as it turns us into batteries.

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...&pictureid=214

This update is mind boggling. I have scam pages going from 0 to 2 and legit pages going from 3 to 2 or 2 to 1 :(

G owns G...soooo it can do whatever it wants. If they want to turn the whole front page into adwords they can.

I remember reading they applied for patents to have their servers on barges out in international waters where the flow of the ocean will produce the energy to power it all plus be out of control of government. Plus it would not surprise me if they are considering doing something the co-founder of paypal has planned here

I hope surfers start using yahoo in protest! I know it won't happen but a man can dream :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by JustRobert (Post 516180)

I hope surfers start using yahoo in protest!

Isn't Yahoo's results mostly being pulled from Google these days?