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At the moment there is little to no penalty for optimising a website entirely for SEO purposes, making it always wiser to over-optimise rather than not. That may well change, however, as Google’s Matt Cutts has announced that the search engine giant is working on an ‘over-optimisation’ penalty for sites that are too focused on SEO rather than content.
Matt announced this revelation during a panel named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better! with industry bigwigs such as Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan also present.
Cutts has said that the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks. The purpose of the update is to “level the playing field” and therefore give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that perform better SEO, but lower quality content.
During the panel, Cutts went on to say:
“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.”
How big an impact do you think this update will have on the SEO industry? Share your thoughts below.
