Google's Matt Cutts, photo by Dustin Woodard

Matt Cutts’ comments in an interview at SXSW have set the SEO world alight; it has been a big topic with discussions continuing all week among those working in SEO and also those owning websites who use SEO services. The term Google SEO penalty has sprung up and those a little behind have been left asking what is the Google SEO penalty? A few are saying it signals an end to SEO, it may well be that these people haven’t really read or heard the interview though, either that or it means the end to their type of SEO: blackhat SEO that in reality has been sick for a long time and that no half decent SEO consultant should be using.

That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been those using blackhat SEO of course, often these people are looking for quick results: bringing traffic but little real value and they have been the bane of site owners for a long time already, and of searchers who do from time to time come across valueless sites with little or nothing to do with their search.

These websites are what Google want to get rid of; Google lets be clear have nothing against good quality sites with good quality content and that is what the Panda update has been all about. You are allowed to use relevant terms on your site as long as you don’t go over the top: Matt Cutts after all did say in this interview that he was looking to level the playing field in terms of: “those people doing over optimization or overly SEO versus those making great content and great sites. ”

Google want great content to appear high on Google and so SEO techniques such as the ones we use at Trig-Point are still completely valid. Our campaigns rely on the creation of great quality content, building relevant (one way) links and using relevant keywords. This is important for site owners too as otherwise you aren’t going to get people staying on your site.

What many think Google may be doing is getting better at semantics and having robots that are able to understand better what a site is about and whether pages on it are good quality and relevant and whether keywords are relevant to the rest of the site.

As for using too many keywords the strategy we follow at trig-point is to use prime keywords at only around 1% of the total content of a page: well within the realms of what you might naturally use when writing without thinking about it. We also are careful about how many keywords we use; Matt Cutts’ comments about penalizing those using too many keywords we feel simply vindicate out existing strategy.

The other main thing Matt Cutts mentioned was giving an SEO penalty due to too many reciprocal links. We very rarely use any reciprocal (two way) links or other link exchange programs that try to circumnavigate Google’s algorithm, which rarely have any success long term.

Some sites with very little SEO may benefit from Google’s proposed changes it seems but Google won’t stop relying on factors indicating quality such as great, regularly updated content and easy to use navigation and some good quality links; perhaps quantity will become less of a factor though for links and we will follow developments here closely.

As we have mentioned before the key to SEO in our opinion is to try and work with Google to tell them what you have, not to try to trick them. For good quality SEO specialists using white hat content focused SEO strategies SEO penalties shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

Categories: SEO Advice

Tags: google, google seo penalty, matt cutts, seo services, whitehat seo services