GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

While this is clearly a factor, we should be taking into consideration as many factors as possible and looking to emulate not those who rank well at the moment, but those who have never implemented SEO strategies for building links. We really need to make sure that we take into account every possible metric before building any “unnatural” links (of course it would be better if we didn’t at all, but we all know that is something of a pipe dream). Make sure you evaluate every ratio you can (IPs, TLDs, money to brand and so on). The best way to do this is by paying for a tool like linkresearchtools.com and evaluating a medium-sized brand which has not actively been engaging in SEO. This is what you want to replicate, and not necessarily those ranking at the top for your keywords as their success may well be short-lived. Overoptimization penalty A few months back I started a thread in the GPWA forum to discuss this, and while I must say I agree with the general consensus that this is quite probably Matt Cutts performing some good old-fashioned scare tactics I would be inclined to suggest that thinking about how your content is going to be valued in the future is a good idea. For those of you not familiar with the particular statement from Google’s anti-spam front man, here it is. “Normally we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working on in the last few months, and hopefully in the next couple months or so, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it. And the idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit. “So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘overoptimization,’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.” Matt Cutts - Google So let’s think for a second about things that people have been telling you to do with your content to help “optimize” it. Are lots of bold tags and italics around your keywords helpful to the user? Probably not. On the other hand, are a lot of social shares, references to relevant, high-quality sources and well- written content a good indicator of whether or not a user will find this useful? Probably yes. Furthering this again, what about title tags and H1’s and H2’s? Shoving keywords into them has been one of the most common ways of “optimizing” these for quite some time. While I’m not suggesting that you stop these practices completely, think about toning them down a little bit. I recently saw one website with 14 different phrases in <strong> tags and while it wasn’t in the gambling sector I did see them jump seven places (they were already on the first page) upon removing these. Again whether Penguin was the overoptimization penalty or not is a point of contention in the SEO community, but the idea that we are going to see more of this sort of thing roll out moving forward is something we should all get used to. We are seeing a clampdown on these things even though some still slip through the cracks. If you are doing this, be warned: You will be caught soon. Future Proofing SEO 10