Cutts: Google To Target Overly SEO'ed Sites Within Weeks

[eddiebooth]

should keep Flippa busy, all those guys with overly-seo'ed (whatever you take that to actually mean) sites being put up for sale before any anticipated drop in their ranking.
Likewise it will keep the good SEO companies busy

[JJMcClure]

So do you think they will only be targetting off site indicators?

Yes exactly.

Semantic markup is a red herring, possibly the issue is getting confused by Google's recent move to 'semantic search'. They're not the same thing.

On the subject of google not liking SEO, I have often attributed my success with page ranking to exactly that, doing what is logical, sensible and functional and not letting the latest google beating trend dictate my website.

In other words you did what was best for your users and you would have done that if there was no such thing as a search engine. Exactly what Google want, clever isn't it.

People trying to artificially contrive those natural signals, they're the ones that need to worry.

[grynge]

Yes exactly.

Then by all accounts none of my test sites should lose or gain any traffic because they have no offsite seo done. Which is why I said in the first place it will be interesting to see what happens.

[rob]

Its always seemed a logical approach to weed out ropey sites! Trail 'something' that SEOers will do, then mention it a few times and perhaps even give a boost for it to make it look legit. Then boot out the sites that do it - and make a big thing of it to educate people.

Yes there will be collateral damage, and people who pay others to 'do seo' for them being caught up however overall it would be a quick and easy marker to the crap out there

Not that I think google are that devious... honest! ;-)

[David S]

Notice that the Google action refers to "sites over doing their SEO" and to "webmasters who are just really aggressive SEOs." I don't think Google will, or even can, parse out sites that do a little SEO in conjunction with providing good content and growing links naturally.

I could see lots of ways of doing that. Google obviously has a huge amount of information that it can sift through to develop standards. For example, a good content-oriented site may have a webmaster who participates in a few forums, so perhaps 10 forum profile links for every 2,000 links is natural. If a site has 100 profile links out of 2,000, the site is probably engaging in aggressive SEO by setting up profiles for the links. Google doesn't need to know which ones are real versus for SEO purposes, all it needs to do is cap the percentage of links it will count from profiles (or from sidebars, footers, comments, or whatever other source of links it deems unnatural).

[JJMcClure]

So do you think they will only be targetting off site indicators?

Then by all accounts none of my test sites should lose or gain any traffic because they have no offsite seo done. Which is why I said in the first place it will be interesting to see what happens.

I had a feeling that was a leading question...

Can you link the sites? I'd like to see what their off-page SEO presence is. Just because you haven't done any doesn't mean they don't have any. Being standards compiant or not shouldn't have any effect on their rankings unless they're literally uncrawlable. 95% of Google's index isn't standards compliant.

Notice that the Google action refers to "sites over doing their SEO" and to "webmasters who are just really aggressive SEOs." I don't think Google will, or even can, parse out sites that do a little SEO in conjunction with providing good content and growing links naturally.

Agreed.

They're going for the people putting a lot of efforts into contriving rankings and NOT because of on-page semantic markup