Too Much SEO? Google’s Working On An “Over-Optimization” Penalty For That

Matt is at it again.

Here is the transcription:

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. 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.

With this and the new upcoming semantic search, what are your feelings/opinions?

lots of room for abuse. I don't know how they will stop people from over optimizing their competitors sites.

I think it's more on-page keyword density that Matt C is referring to. I don't know how you could abuse that and hurt your competitors.

May be just trying to scare us lol. And yeah, lots of room for abuse, as always

What? Google has always been slapping for overdoing keywords or too many backlinks or linkpyramids.

Google is intent on wrecking the ability of small sites to ever have a reliable means of building visibility and traffic for their site. Notice how every viable and working business model for IM websites have been disrupted over the years by one algo change or another. The cover language is always "we're trying to help people with a great content and site," but big boy sites with crap page content and site elements never seem to be negatively impacted by the changes---only the small sites, regardless of quality. The ultimate end game of Google appears to be one of "only authority/Big Inc sites rank page one, whether they are good or bad, all other small fry, back of the line."

I think they have already kicked some of this in over the last few months. I have a site with hardly any links, but lots of onsite text and internal links, which is ranking good for competitive loan terms.

Trouble is, google are making the number one spot less sweet now by altering the top few resluts very often. Obviously to entice people to go to ppc for more consistent traffic.

The future of seo is getting scary - aka less profitable.

Nothing new, Big G is always changing stuff

Same shit all over again and again. A robot will remain a robot. Period

C'mon man... Source, or it didn't happen.

Here's the earlier thread

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/419140-matt-cutts-google-will-target-over-optimized-websites-month-two.html

Soon we'll be penalized for having meta description tag on our pages

"Hey, ban this guy, he knows what word seo means!" - google becomes insane!