“Ahhhhh!” is the sound of countless SEO companies crying out in anguish, according to this article from CNET.

This is a good thing for the internet I feel. How often have you done a Google search and ended up on a circular journey through link farms and affiliate sites, trying to find the actual answer to your query?

Google is sick of this as well. They are now going to start penalising sites that appear to have been purposely over-optimised for searching in an attempt to ‘game’ Google’s search engine algorithm.

According to Matt Cutts from Google, “We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect,”

Unfortunately for companies that have built themselves around offering this sort of service, this change will require them to re-think their strategies. From our point of view, we will continue to say what we always have – the best way to get recognised by Google is by providing good content!