In this day and age everyone knows the importance of search engine optimization, or SEO for short. It is often times the difference of having your website seen or lost in the noise of the Internet.
There are many ways to improve the search engine results of your website, mostly involving the use of the “keywords” you want your site to show up for. But everyone knows as soon as there are rules, people will try to break them. When people on the Internet bend or break the rules it is know as “black-hat” techniques. Of course at this point in time many black-hat SEO techniques exist such as keyword stuffing and link schemes, which is basically just spamming your own website or others to improve your performance results.
If you want your website to show for certain keyword searches, it makes sense to just use those words excessively even if incoherent, right? Well maybe at one point in time, but Google has continually updated their search engine algorithms to prevent benefitting from this type of behavior. Google Panda (released February 2011) and Google Penguin (released April 2012) are both updated aimed to decrease the performance rankings of websites violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This means websites are penalized for simply spamming keywords devoid of real content. Google’s computers are able to analyze websites to determine those that have quality content and those simply trying to abuse search engine optimization techniques and saturating their site with keywords.
Google enacted these updates to “level the playing field” of search engine optimization. While sometimes an innocent site may get caught in the mess, the numbers show the updates to have been effective in improving the quality of search results.
For more information about search engine optimization services, please contact the New Merkel Consulting Group.
