Are sites that "smell of SEO" being demoted?

[irvingw]

It's only terrifying if you aren't ahead of the curve with SEO. It's scary for people hiring SEOs too because they are hiring someone who is supposed to know but quite often they don't and wind up hurting the site.

Google is coming down very hard on links which is why they had to provide a disallow tool to help you combat poor SEO past practices or negative SEO attacks which before you could not really handle other than getting all the links down that are harming you.

Also, onpage optimization can hurt you just as easily, because Google knows you are in control of those factors, so under optimization is the new optimization.

[MarieHaynes]

"It's only terrifying if you aren't ahead of the curve with SEO" - Great point!

[LeahHutcheon]

My company was recently approached by someone who's done SEO for some quite big sites, promising a top three position within 4 weeks for a competitive area by "spinning".

Thankfully, my boss swiftly told him we didn't need his services as there's no such thing as a fly-by-knight in reality.

I guess it's just about keeping as up to date as possible so whatever we do has a positive lasting impression. Phew!: does take some work though.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Hi Marie!  I loved your recent post about the difference between Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Link Penalties recently.

First off, I'd like to say that I'm still getting awesome results with my SEO.  I work on around 100 websites, and both my on-site and off-site techniques are improving the results.

That being said, I can see that the site level metrics are having a larger influence.  I work in a niche that has lots of different providers for websites, and most of them create tons of duplicate content.  The sites that are creating 1000's of pages of duplicate content have been hit hard in the past 6+ months, and it's getting harder to keep them ranking well, but the one's with great architecture are actually getting easier.

For a great example of a company taking the initiative on this I'd look at Autotrader.  They recently, within the last year I believe, decided to no-index all of their inventory.  They did this because all of it was the exact duplicate of what the dealers had posted in dozens of other places online.  Right after they made that change I saw a dramatic improvement in rankings across the board.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Cody,

Thanks for this comment.  It's very helpful.  Care to share a little bit about how you are accomplishing your off-site SEO?  Or would that be spilling the secret sauce?  

I bet that your sites have really good on page structure and great content as well and this is probably the key.

[simon_realbuzz]

There definitely seems to be a sea change whereby much of the focus now is to concentrate on providing good content and great user experience. By getting your audience to remain on your site for longer, sharing your content, and potentially returning to your site again is what should pay dividends . That not to say that certain basic SEO principles should be ignored but user experience is surely the key.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

I work in the automotive niche, and almost all of the website providers have issues with duplicate content, and site structure.  However, we are working to improve that.

Anyway, my off-site is mostly going after guest blog posts from local bloggers, as well as anyone writing in my clients niche.  I'm not good with macro's in Excel, so all of my outreach is done by hand.  Beyond that I focus on citations since my clients are always looking for local customers.

When you checked out the different real estate searches did you see a lot of local results?  Whenever I do those searches I see the 6-pack of local results.  That actually makes me really excited, because the average real estate person only has a handful of citations.  So, you could really take over those searches, in theory, with a citation binge.

[EGOL]

There definitely seems to be a sea change whereby much of the focus now is to concentrate on providing good content and great user experience. By getting your audience to remain on your site for longer, sharing your content, and potentially returning to your site again is what should pay dividends....

heh...  this is replacing linkjuice.    The new rocket fuel for SEO is contentjuice.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Future Services to Game Google:

• Get 10,000 visitors who spend 20 minutes on site, and 5000 return visitors!

• Get 5000 Facebook shares, and 10,000 Retweets

• Get A Comment With From an Author Rank of over 9000!

In all seriousness, though, I think this may already be happening.  Going through the analytic histories of some of my clients I've seen them get several hundred visits in one day from a keyword that has less than 10 searches a month in the Google Keyword Tool, and they ranked on page 50 of the SERPS.

[usef4u]

Hi

Marie, I believe there have been many Penguin refreshes, but there was no official announcement. I even read in a post or a tweet when Dr. Pete also mentioned that there have been refreshes of Penguin. And Marie even, i am noticing these changes since last month.

[DonB]

I'm glad to see this discussion, because I think we're experiencing a sea-change that began last year about this time with Google's big changes. I'm seeing that active linkbuilding without social-signal input is hurting some sites, whereas hands-off traditional linkbuilding (i.e., letting inbound links occur naturally rather than consciously creating them) with social-signal links/discussion is helping some sites.

For me, the big issue is whether SEOs can change the internal culture of clients, to get them to understand the growing-growing-growing importance of social media links (and brand discussion that doesn't necessarily include links). Clients who still don't "get" social media usually also don't "get" the need for a content-publishing plan, in which the best way to announce new content is through social media.

A related issue is the increasing importance of the authorship tag to Google rankings. Many organizations - large and small - still refuse to allow employees to identify as spokesperson-evangelists for the brand, yet it's clear Google rankings rewards those who publish as Google+ individuals. How will Google reconcile their ranking love for brands, with their new ranking love for Google+ authors?

UPDATE: just after submitting the above, I saw a new article on SERPs gains for content by Google+ authors:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269354/Google-in-the-SERPs-Increasing-Authorship-Adoption-High-Data

[EGOL]

If you take a product, as an example let's say... "Joe's Widgets".

The site that received #1 rankings in the past might have been an article about Joe's Widgets on Wikipedia.  That was simply promotion of the most powerful site with a relevant article.

Now, if Joe's Widgets appear on product pages on hundreds of sites, the brand site, JoesWidgets.com gets an enormous boost in the SERPs.  Perhaps beating Wikipedia because of these "brand mentions".  This is a relatively new development from Google within the past few months.

Still not recognized strongly enough, perhaps, might be HowToUseWidgets.com that has 40 pages of articles about how to use, Joe's Widgets, how to select them, how to main tain them, photos of the different models, comparisons of Joe's widgets to six other brands of widgets.   In my opinion, this is the authority site but it gets lower rankings because it is not powerful and isn't the brand name website.  However, this site might get more relevant traffic than JoesWidgets.com and wikipedia simply because it has saturated the SERPs for lots of the important secondary and long-tail keywords.  This is the attack that I am building.