Don’t try to cheat Google says Matt Cutts

I am so amazed at the amount of companies that still believe there is a magic button that will perform instant search engine optimization. Google’s Matt Cutts gave an interview to Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting where he revealed some things that would help those trying to improve optimization results with some solid tips. Although the interview was lengthy I have summarized some of the key factors here.

1. The more relevant the links that you have the more pages of you site will be indexed.
This emphasizes the importance of manual link building. It is not enough and in fact will likely hurt your results to utilize automated programs to scour and spam the web for any back link that you can achieve. The key word here is relevant which is absolutely critical. For example, having a shoe store link to your office supply business is not going to be in your best interest for relevancy.

2. Google does not like paid links.
In case you were wondering if you could bypass the work and simply by your linking strategy, think again. Matt Cutts said that Google “does a lot of stuff” to try and detect paid links so they do not corrupt search engine results. In a nut shell, save your money and put it towards quality link building practices.

3. Affiliate or cookie cutter pages do not get high rankings
This is a real pet peeve for us here at GILL Media. We have a lot of potential clients come to us, who have bought into a business, and they get a free website as part of it, but cannot seem to get any traction when it comes to search engine placement. These are not necessarily small businesses either – we can also be pointing the finger at big franchises. Often with limitations as to what they can do with their sites. [Told you it was a pet peeve]. The problem is if the content is similar to other content (on older sites than yours) than you won’t rank high. If Google detects any affiliate link on a page, than this link will not pass any Page Rank Power to the page.

4. Duplicate content can create problems.
First read point 3. To extend this problem from a different perspective we see many companies distributing articles and then posting the content to their blog. Google will see this as duplicate, and the blog will not benefit. Remember content is not king – fresh quality content is.

5. Slow servers are an issue.
Reinforcing the importance of quality hosting (not necessarily the cheapest), Google can set limits as to how many pages it will index on servers that are slow to crawl.

6. Content scarce low quality pages can create problems
Many sites out there are product rich and content poor. Every page on your site should have text that describes the page. If anything be wordy. As Matt says “You really want to have most of your pages have actual products with lots of text on them”. A functional web design is of course aesthetically pleasing to build trust, but the real focus should be on navigation, layout, code and content.

Some great tips for sure, but it comes back to simply knowing that good organic search engine optimization is labor intensive, time consuming, and takes time to produce quality lasting results. All that being said – traffic generated from rich keywords that are relevant to your business, can change your business forever. So we certainly feel, it’s worth the effort!

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