Search Engine Optimization - Google makes their message clear

In the last few hours, I was doing catching up with the news around the search engine marketing industry for the past weeks. The news pretty much revolved around one single player - Google. Let’s catch some breath first.

When John Chow came up with Review Karma, I thought it was a brilliant plan. The method successfully sneaks in Google’s algorithm, and once ranked Top 3 for the competitive keywords “Make Money Online”. Well, one big lesson to all the SEOs is: search ranking is like a floating cloud. One day you are there, the next day you might be not, and sometimes, you can be very far away. John Chow’s website got penalized. No where to be found for his “once-proud-keyword“. Heck, not even his own name.

That’s not the end of the story. I somehow got to this thread of DP and found out Text Link Ads was dropped as well.

Goodness, I thought. What on earth is happening?

Google makes their message clear to the webmasters around the world: “If you are going to game Google, keep it unnoticed.”

Don’t go around telling people that you will improve their search engine ranking by reviewing your blog and get a link back. Don’t sell your services by pitching the search engine ranking benefits.

These are the costly lessons by those that are affected. Could this spell the beginning of the end of search engine optimization? Love to hear your opinions ;)