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Search Engine Articles
Google Cracks Down on the SEO Industry
As this week comes to a close, there is no doubt that the most
significant development in the Internet marketing world was Google's latest
update and algorithm change, undergone around the third week of November, and
dubbed by the search engine community as "Update Florida".
The soon-to-become-public mother of all search engines decided to crack down on
the search engine optimization industry as its IPO draws near, and implemented a
filter against thousands of sites that appeared to have been artificially over-optimized
for certain competitive (and commercially appealing) keyphrases, wiping those
sites out of the rankings.
What triggers the filter is still a subject of debate, although evidence points
to the use of common search engine optimization techniques like placing keywords
in the page title, increasing keyword density on the page, or placing keywords
in the anchor text of inbound links.
The fact that these techniques have been widely used by many legitimate
businesses, has caused thousands of perfectly relevant sites to disappear from
the rankings, toghether with sites that clearly abused these techniques (for
example, pages belonging to bogus networks of sites that link to each other,
created and controlled by unscrupulous webmasters to artificially boost PageRank).
We can safely say, therefore, that in its attempt to weed out spammers, Google
has thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
A large debate is now going on over if Google did right or wrong, and over what
may have been its underlying motivations to take this course of action. Opinions
range from the belief that Google did the right thing, to the theory that Google
implemented the filter to force the eliminated sites to buy AdWords (paid
sponsor listings). One way or the other, one thing is certain: with this move,
Google has put a question mark on everything we knew about search engine
optimization.
In the meantime, thousands of businesses owners who used (or abused) search
engine optimization techniques to push their pages to the top of the Google
rankings (making a lot of money in the process) have now found their businesses
destroyed. One more proof that focusing on only one Internet marketing strategy
(especially search engine optimization, where we will always be at the mercy of
the people tweaking the algorithms) is a recipee for disaster.
The evolution of Google will be an interesting development to follow in the
months to come. If you want to read more about Google's recent controversial
algorithm change, you can read the following articles (they are somewhat
lengthy, but will give you an accurate picture of what's going on with Google
these days, and of what we may expect from them in the future):
http://www.searchengineguide.com/lloyd/2003/1125_bl1.html
http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/buyads.htm
You can freely reprint this article. Just
include the following resource box at the end:
Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net
) a website and newsletter that gives you useful advice on web design and
Internet marketing, one free tip at a time
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