It is not new news that Google have been doing lots of clever things with their search algorithms this year in order to present even better results to their visitors. Many good websites have been penalised for over optimising their websites and trying to get their rankings better un-naturally. It shouldn’t be a surprise, the channel used to be called ‘natural search’ – hint is in the name. Then lots of clever agencies came along and started to make money by beating the system – hence the birth of ‘SEO’ or ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ as it’s extended to.
At this point the agencies are now being paid to undo all of the work they’d been doing for the past couple of years. It’s heartbreaking really but does make search a better place again. How many websites have you visited where every other word is a keyword that has an internal link to a page that you didn’t really want to go and visit? It’s annoying and quite obvious not just to the savvy marketer but to our visitors aswell.
I’ve been surprised to see so many websites are still employing these tactics to try and improve their rankings, are there still agencies out there advising this or are they just employing practices they heard about last year and haven’t heard the news recently. Stop keyword stuffing your website content!!
I think it would be hugely useful if all of the blogs, guides, videos and other advice that is available online and talks about old SEO practices could be banished or at least pushed to the bottom of rankings. After all for people who are self taught (and there are many), how are they to know that what they’re reading is old school and now considered bad practice?
For those of you reading this blog and thinking about stuffing in some keywords and overdoing internal links, you now know better. SEO, in fact let’s call it Natural Search again, is about writing quality content that is genuinely useful to the person who has done a search. You have to think about them and not you – write your website how you would want to read it as a visitor and only look at advice on the matter that was created post Feb 12.
Good luck.
