Google Webmaster Notification and SEO's Evolution
By Jon Revill

Matt Cutts made my day. In his recent post he covers communication between Google and webmasters.

In recent months Google has been testing communication with webmasters via email to notify them that they caught the eye of the Google spam team and could potentially harm their Google presence.

Matt says that the program has been successful but there are certain limitations to email when attempting to contact the webmaster. As an alternate method the Google Webspam team and the Sitemaps team have put their heads together and have provided and alternate solution.

Google Sitemaps have been updated to include notifications in the webmaster console for sites that have drawn penalties and offer a reinclusion request.

These notifications are geared towards helping legitimate businesses, not for notifying Black Hats employing negative SEO techniques.

This is HUGE!

Google has always been active in the webmaster community, but this is going a step above in my book.

In this industry there have always been those unscrupulous SEOs who intentionally spam a site to attempt to achieve rankings. A certain ex-SEO and their now famous doorway pages come to mind.

Site owners, particularly smaller sites, often never knew what hit them. Google can now let them know what has been done to their site.

But Jon...isn't that what SEO's are for?

Well, yes and no.

Matt alludes to the perfect search engine, one that not only provides value to their user, but also works with the website to identify potential indexing and ranking issues.

This has been the job of SEO's for the last several years. An entire industry sprung up around providing content and META tags to boost rankings.

The dark side of this industry discovered doorway pages, hidden text, and cloaking to achieve their goals. What Google is working towards here is completely removing the Black Hat element.

With these tactics effectively gone SEOs will be able to focus on what is truly important, providing value to a site's users and helping their clients build a viable, sustainable business. Thus ending the era of hard SEO and bringing in the age of true Interactive Marketing.

Interactive marketing moves well beyond the old staples of META tags, content, and base level linking.

Traditional SEO started with the site and optimizing for rankings on specific keywords, pushing outward trying to gain as much visibility as possible through rankings.

This strategy has one major flaw, it is often blind to the user. That's not to say there isn't any value in these practices, but they are only a part of a far bigger picture.

Interactive marketing starts with the user and looks inward at the site to provide value. It answers questions like:

- Who is my audience?
- What are their needs?
- What are they doing once they are on the site?
- What are they doing afterwards?

Value for a user begins with what they need, not what a site wants them to need.

User data and activity are endless sources of strong information to help websites grow and improve. The new world of interactive marketing is driven by identifying, providing value to, and converting users. Building a business rather than building traffic. Interactive marketing should be just that, marketing! Interactive simply refers to the mediums to which you apply your marketing strategy.

As Google moves toward the ideal search engine, SEO firms should look to the users, open up their traffic analytics accounts and move towards interactive marketing.

Website success was once based on whether or not your site was listed in the top ten. Success as a business, however, must be based on how much value you provide to the user.

Also see:
Reach Your Online Public Relations Goals through Optimized Press Releases, Blogger Relations and Social Networks
Changes in SERPs Display and Relevance Measures Will Fuse Organic SEM and PR

Jon Revill is MarketSmart Interactive's Manager of Interactive Technology and Garrett hasn't given him a login and password for SEL yet.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |