Imagine you are an SEO specialist who sits down every day to optimize your clients’ sites, creating quality, useful or Helpful Content , and following what we all think (or should I say thought) are good SEO practices.
What would you think if I told you that, perspective , you might be in Google’s sights?
According to research by Cyrus Shepard, Google may be penalizing SEO over-optimization . Apparently, Google is linking traditional SEO optimization factors with content design for search engines rather than users.
Helpful Content vs Search Engine First
To begin with, we should remember what Google says about Helpful Content :
“Google’s automat ranking systems are design to present useful and reliable information creat primarily to benefit people, not to achieve top rankings in search results.”
The question that arises is how does Google determine that content was creat with search engine optimization in mind and not with user assistance? Yes, we all know that what we SEOs do is aim at improving search engine results. But that doesn’t mean our content isn’t quality and helpful to users.
What is SEO over-optimization?
SEO over-optimization occurs when there is an excessive use of SEO techniques. In some cases, there is so much emphasis on improving a website’s ranking that it becomes counterproductive. One of the most common is keyword stuffing, which is basically the excessive use of keywords and their variants, forc inclusion in content, titles, and headers.
What’s new is that many of the practices that were previously accept now seem to be add to the list of over-optimization practices.
Do Google updates penalize good SEO?
In the research, Cyrus us the database of 50 websites analyz in the Google Update Winners and Losers study and cross-referenc them with Ahrefs metrics . The goal was to examine “classic” SEO factors and the relationship between their presence or absence with the winning and losing sites following the latest algorithm updates.
While there were several factors where no correlation could be found, there were others where a striking negative correlation was observ. What’s surprising is that the factors that receiv the greatest impact were those consider “best SEO practices” generally accept by the entire industry .
