Breaking news is the launch of Penguin 4.0, an update of the famous Google algorithm that was introduced for the first time in 2012.
In this news we will try to easily understand what are the innovations introduced by this release and from this we will try to extend the reasoning to understand what can be the future of SEO.
This update brings a number of improvements that can be taken in two main points:
Essentially these two innovations make us realize that Google has decided to give more importance to the content, thanks to real-time updates which let website owners to quickly benefit from the updates made to their pages.
The second new feature indicates that Penguin is able to value the content on each page, regardless of the value of the whole site, so "forcing" the owners to realize interesting and useful content on each page.
Both innovations reinforce Penguin which has as main target to identify webspam and drastically reduce the visibility of unnecessary web pages. This is the way to give greater weight to those who are committed every day in providing useful and relevant information and creating specific quality content for their audiences.
So this update gives greater visibility to good web sites shifting focus from blak hat triks to white hat seo.
Google is clear on this point:
We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.
Reading what is written in the attached screenshot - taken from a Google webmaster central blog post of 2012 - we wonder if SEO is dead because the contents become increasingly important to gain visibility at the expense of other formerly considered musts techniques to appear.
If we talk about strange operations that magically guarantee you to reach first position on SERP, then yes, SEO is dead. Black hat SEO techniques are no longer accepted and could even give the opposite effect worsening the position of the page/site.
If we talk about SEO as accurate work moved to improve user experience, which will also facilitate the crawler, then in this case, SEO is more alive than ever! In fact, the evolution of Penguin requires greater attention to the content as a whole, from the choice of the domain until the copy going through the content structure, and even more close attention to the other 199 factors considered by google as relevant.
SEO is alive and more than ever requires attention and refined actions to improve the user experience, speed, the ability to communicate information and all those aspects both technical and communication aimed at creating added value.
Here in Dot Business we follow the path of white hat seo since the beginning with a specific SEO consulting integrated on the web site creation.
Yes, we search best keywords for our customers but we use them to create great contents and not keyword stuffing.
