According to Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google, Google is working on a new penalty that would target webmasters that over optimize their websites. This is really big news in the search engine optimization world. Although we have always known that too much optimization is a bad thing. This is really the first time Google has come out and said that they would create a penalty for too much optimization.
Here is a transcription taken from Matt Cutts discussion of the subject.
“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.”
So as we can see Google is working hard to “level the playing field” for those who do not engage in search engine optimization. This is a new development but it will be interesting to see how it changes companies SEO strategies. Does this mean less keyword density on a page? Does it mean less keywords in meta titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, h1 and h2? These will be the type of optimization strategies SEO companies will be evaluating when these changes finally do go live.
Overall, Ignite Visibility feels that Google will most likely be responsible with their implementation of this new penalty. Really, only the significantly overly optimized websites will suffer.
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