SEOs, Matt Cutts Is Not The Devil, or Why We Have Nothing to fear from Proper SEO.

Matt Cutts, Google Spam Master.

Online, SEO Is The Game To Play If You Play By The Rules

Let’s face it. Spammers ruin everything. In their ongoing effort to make an easy buck, they are experimenting with ways to move traffic around the web. Take Pinterest for example. If you haven’t seen the news about their recent fight with spammers, it’s a sad read. Here’s a great product used by 1,090 people each minute of the day, and spammers are using covert URLs to get visitors to ecommerce sites. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against affiliate marketing when it’s done right. For example, if Pinterest made money via affliate marketing, that’s ok. Pinterest gives us something, entertainment, in exchange for getting some money out of the deal by being an affiliate.

This is where Google’s recent announcement about punishing overly SEOed sites comes in. Google has a whole unit, headed up by the venerable Matt Cutts, that does nothing but fight spammers. Most of the changes they make to their ranking algorithim are to fight the spammers that ruin an otherwise great product. When was the last time you saw a link farm? Thank you very much Matt Cutts.

The whole overly SEOed sites brouhaha started when Matt made this remark at SXSW

“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.”

Google wants SEOed sites which is why they tell you how to do it. What Google doesn’t want are people taking advantage of this knowledge to have crappy sites rank well, which is why they make all these algorithim changes. People used to cram the meta keywords tag full of junk, which is why Google doesn’t pay any attention to the meta keywords tag in regard to ranking. Although they do provide great insight for SEOs into a competitor’s strategy.

Unfortunately, no one is perfect, and crappy sites still can do very well. But that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is to simply say that people that are playing by the rules and doing the right thing have nothing to worry about. SEOs that have been in the business for awhile have seen this before. It’s just another algorithim tweak.