We celebrate what the Wall Street Journal is covering with Google Penguin’s latest impact on business. Though the story seeks to sympathize with the outliers whose businesses have been impacted by the search algorithm change, the truth is there are many people seeking to use gimmicks rather than do the hard work of inbound marketing and effective sales process.
Tricking Google with keyword stuffing or aggressive link exchanges is not going to work. They are continually weeding out the cheaters.
Note Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, in the article:
“The Penguin algorithm update was designed to reduce Web spam, which is when websites try to get a higher search ranking than they deserve by deceiving or manipulating search engines. In many cases, the affected sites had been spamming for a long time.”
Google’s goal is not to put you out of business. They want to reward useful and valuable content and get the web spam out of there.
If you play within the rules and do the hard work of creating human content that connects, things take care of themselves pretty well. There are some optimization things which can be done, however, there is a distinct line between manipulation and optimization.
There are bound to be continual algorithm changes. Hiring one of these gimmick SEO companies and publishing web spam can jeopardize a lot of effort you may have built on sand. Why create a bubble for yourself?
Assets built from building true authority with your content and relevance from credible linking to your content is what ultimately will win. The asset cannot easily be swept away.
We like to think of spam in our inbox. It is prevalent on the web and you can engage in such activities to your peril. As for us, we are going to stick with good old fashioned inbound marketing.
Want to do it right?