Google Over Optimisation Penalty

Googles Matt Cutts has broken the ‘norm’ and has pre-announced an upcoming algorithm that has Internet Marketers and website owners biting their nails yet again!  Matt announced that his team are working on an over optimisation penalty that will penalize sites that are doing too much SEO and not enough fresh, quality content.

All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimisation 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.

This has left open the way for many nervous questions
Will this mean competitors can perform negative seo and use automated tools to blast your site with links?
Will Google take into consideration your past mistakes and linking strategies?
Arghhh I can hear you say, ‘Have all your efforts been wasted’?
Google for a while now has been introducing algorithms, the Panda update was detrimental for many sites, even the big brands.  You only have too Google ‘BMW cloaking’ to read about how the German BMW got delisted!

What does the future hold?
Nobody can predict the way forward for SEO, all you can do is adopt a great deal of patience and diversify your internet marketing methods.  If you have been using companies that promise top Google rankings then it might be time to change!  This could be yet another ‘Google dance’ that will see many sites lose ranking or it could be just a way for SEO to evolve that includes digital media and other new age marketing.
My personal opinion is that Google wants to maximize pay per click and make it the most viable way of gaining high rankings, but does this mean you should stop SEO?  Definitely not but you do have to make sure you are not putting all your eggs in one basket.  A good SEO Consultant will encourage you to participate in many different forms of internet marketing and they will understand that SEO has been changing for some time now, diversifying is crucial.

What should you do?

• Ensure your site receives regular and fresh updated content (this could be blogs)
• Do not over link your site with the same anchors
• Think of SEO as just one component of Internet Marketing.
• Focus on conversions rather than being ‘the top of Google’ – If your marketing plan has only this goal and you lose rankings, this will put an end to your once successful plan!
• Build for humans, not for robots.