Matt Cutts anounces over-otimization penalty!

Have a look ! Hwat do you think will this change SEO....Get ready for some big changes ...like the need for useful content

Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.”

Matt announced this during a panel Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan and Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager of Bing at SXSW named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!. The audio for the session has been published where I learned that Google has been working on a new penalty that targets site’s that overly optimize for search engines for the past few months.

Matt Cutts said the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks. The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Cutts said. To give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that have content that is not as great but do a better job with SEO.

Here is the audio clip, you can find Matt saying this about 1/3rd the way in. I have tried to transcribe it below but note, it is not 100% word for word.

Here is the transcription:

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.

In 2009, Matt did a video on over optimization penalties saying there was no such thing. Here is that video:
see full article here:

http://searchengineland.com/too-muc...n-“over-optimization”-penalty-for-that-115627

 

About time.

Can see it now, some seo company will come out with a plan called "we will not let google penalize your site because we will do very little seo work on your site" and then charge more than the service is worth.

 

Great, now crappy sites will do poorly, good sites will do poorly, and the only sites that will do good is Walmart and other corporations that purchase the keywords.

 

that is precisely the point , More cash in the big G pockets. Pay for it or dont rank!

 

If this were true than sites like wikipedia would be destroyed by it because they cannot control their backlinks. They get billions from all over the place naturally.

Will that happen?

Nope, google will give them a free pass!

 

Sounds no different than what panda was supposed to do and failed..

I think they are just flogging the dead horse.

 

ummm, no. Its actually the total opposite of panda.

 

I guess that depends on what your personal definition is on panda because no one is right.

To me panda was supposed to improve the content provided by googles searches and as such better content should provide better ranking..

 

Their abundance of backlinks is normal and expected for wiki, there is nothing that would draw a flag. They do not look at every site through the same lens. Wiki is not expected to have backlinks like a random blog.

 

I kinda saw this coming

 

Naaah.. I don't believe this. I have seen a lot of abusive websites with all keys being stuffed on the pages and the contents and yet they are still on page 1. If this is good to be true, then Big G must prove it.

 

Unn, this new penalty on over optimization will slow down SEO expert's job and SEO will totally be quality content based. I fully support google's decision to make googleBot smarter.

 

Seen this one coming for ages. I don't think it'll be a major update. My guess is they'll start giving a boost for internal pages of strong authority domains on mid-long tail searches as the end result. As mentioned above, somewhat of an anti panda really

 

Interesting. Too little optimization is ineffective, and now too much optimization is going to be ineffective as well.

 

whenever Google update comes, some sites get benefited whereas some got penalty.

 

so how do u describe an over-optimized website?

 

Over optimization of a web site and is such a "gray area". The bottom line is just build a great natural site and employ effective marketing strategies and if the demand for your product is there you will make money

 

I really can't follow Google anymore, first it was this and now it's something else, and they constantly changing the rules of SEO but people don't see any results at all.
I'v been writing incredibly good and useful content for two years now and still I'm amazed to see what kind of spammy sites are ranking better than me.
Google is just loosing this game, honestly I don't know what will these changes bring to us.

James

 

I have felt the over optimization on some of my sites - it seems very true for new domains getting a back link, or domains that previously had no back links.

I bet they will have to reverse the changes just like google panda - I wonder why they make such drastic announcements only to reverse it shortly after.

I mean domains with no content were ranking for very competitive terms after the panda update - it was crazy! lol

 

Me too. I'm sick of junky-but-SEO'd websites sitting high in the rankings.