Study: Google seems to focus strongly on content in 2008
SEO campaign can be basically divided into two types:
a. SEO onsite work
b. Link building
In the past, Google algorithm is more of offsite factors such as “inbound links”. This happens around year 2000 to 2007. We heard of “Google bombing” in the past that created serious search engine problems such as the President George Bush page ranking Position 1 for the term “Miserable Failure” in www.google.com
Google takes serious actions to correct this type of issue by tweaking algorithms and one of it indirectly affects popular SEO campaign strategies (such as link building campaign type only-without onsite work). The way Google correct Google bombing is simple.We all know that Google ranks pages strongly because of “keywords in anchor text”, spammers tend to build massive amounts of back links containing the targeted term “miserable failure” and targeted to President George Bush page. In fact, there is no exact term “miserable failure” in the content, or the page talks about “miserable failure”. But using the old Google algorithm, a page can rank for this term with just links.Finally starting this year, we have seen major changes in this factor. Google tends to be very strict with content in ranking pages. Not just content but with this requirement:
a. Presence of Exact Keyword in the Content
b. Well-written content that is topical and with thoughts that centered on targeted words.
c. Unique content (it is why with Google filtering algorithm, all those sites that have highly similar pages or domains experience serious ranking problems).
d. The content is well aligned with the title tag.
This makes Google bombing countermeasure very effective because in the first place, the anchor text should be highly relevant and related to the page content. If the anchor text does not make sense to the content or it is far from being said to be relevant, Google will devalue the links and will not make ranking benefits to the page.
What does this mean to an SEO campaign? This means that to be successful in the efforts of ranking the pages high in Google, the webmaster should focus on developing high quality content which is highly related to the anchor text that is build to the page.
This makes a campaign without SEO onsite work very hard to rank in Google nowadays. It is because the website is not checked for content optimization. It is not only about content but to check the site versus Google webmaster quality guidelines which is highly important in ranking.
Google will not rank pages if there is a penalty imposed on the site or the site has spam.
