Google to Penalize Over-Optimized Sites – So What

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about Google penalizing websites for being “over-optimized” or having too much SEO on their site. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land has posted a transcript and audio of the presentation.  Here is the quote from Matt Cutts:

“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.”

What does this all mean? Does this mean that SEO is going to die like all the critics always say? Should you be worried about this? Well, if you have been doing SEO the right way, then no, you shouldn’t be worried.

Content is king. You have heard it before and you will hear it a million times again. If you create great content that people want to read, they will share it, and you will gain natural links that way. It will become more social, and people will link back to you because your content has made you an authority in this field. The search engines will do the same!

If you have been a believer that, “it doesn’t matter what content is on the page, as long as I get enough links, I will rank higher,” then you may be in trouble from these updates whenever Google rolls them out. I have never been able to understand that mentality, but it exists. You may have been able to rank in the top position for certain keywords because you had a lot of links pointing to you with that anchor text, but if you don’t gain a single conversion from that top spot, then what was it all for?

At the end of the day, who is reading this content? Human beings. Who is purchasing your products or filling out a lead form based on the content they are reading? Human beings. Keyword stuffing could get you to the top of the rankings, but when human being comes to the site and it just doesn’t make any sense, so they just leave, what did that get you? Another visit in Google Analytics?

Going back to where I started this post, great content. That is what SEO is all about, content, content, content.  Great content leads to links.  It always has been and it always will be. If your content sucks, nobody will share it. If your content sucks, nobody will convert. If your content sucks, but you performed magical SEO, you ranked well, but according to Google, those days are limited.

So, ask yourself, how good is your content?