Here’s a riddle for you…
Q: What’s black and white and read all over?
A: SEO!
It seems as far as Google is concerned, SEO is either black-hat (unethical) or white-hat (ethical). Just like the 2011 panda update or their most recent penguin, it’s all black and white. There is no gray. And the pages that get top ranking are most certainly “read all over” just like the newspaper that served as the punch line in the old joke. If SEO’ers game Google it’s their low-quality web pages that are “read all over” – and that’s exactly what Google does NOT want.
The unfortunate thing here is that with mass updates like Panda and Penguin, a lot of innocent websites get knocked out of top spots – having done nothing wrong. In fact, a representative of Google has stated that the Penguin update will focus on locating and dealing with “over SEO’d” web pages.
Yes; that is what it sounds like. If your website shows to many signs of intentional optimization, it will be penalized. So what can you do? The good news is, it’s not very complicated. The bad news is, it goes against what 99% of SEO professionals are used to doing to score top rankings.
Let’s explore the possibilities together…