Published on April 12, 2012 Google moves to block dodgy search engine optimisation (SEO) methods
Google has been making a number of changes to the way it ranks websites to attempt to penalise websites that put up pages for the sake of it. That’s good news for shop owners and shoppers alike.
How many times have you been to a website to find that it’s just the name of the product being sold stuffed with keywords for each of the states or major capitals in Australia. For example, on a party site how many times have you found half the page filled with links to “balloons Perth”, “balloons Sydney”, “balloons Melbourne” that all go back to the home page of your site – or a content page with little interesting content on it? We see it a lot, but fortunately Google are now moving to stop this type of behaviour.
Google’s new algorithm changes being rolled out around the world attempt to penalise sites that are “overly optimised” – offering little useful content and just filling pages with irrelevant rubbish to generate bait for spiders or who build links through using automated tools to post “generic” links on blog comment pages with irrelevant or generic comments.
This means dodgy SEO companies and those proponents of dodgy SEO techniques can now look out as Google will hunt down their sites and de-value their rankings.
That’s good news for the rest of us who are producing good quality content, building a natural link profile of real links to your site over time. If you have an online shop you should therefore concentrate on:
- Writing great category descriptions
- Creating content pages with useful help and tips for using your products
- Post great product images that are high quality
- Write content pages with useful content on them – don’t keyword stuff
- Run a blog to point traffic back to your shop
- Play by the rules and Google will reward you – even if your competitors don’t.
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