SEO

Google Phone Number Spam Pages Knocked out with Latest Algorithm Update

How often have you plugged in a phone number that was on your caller ID to see who it is, or looked up a phone number in your phone because you didn’t remember who it was and you got pages like this in Google?

It’s called phone number spam or phone number stuffing.  Believe it or not companies did SEO for phone numbers, millions of phone numbers.  Basically a ploy just to gain traffic or to mislead people. Can’t imagine any reputable seo firm being willing to work on something like this, but apparently some did. These pages were frustrating and absolutely worthless.  Well Google after years of it being a problem has finally addressed it in their most recent update.

After doing a few quick tests , while the sites coming up related to phone numbers are still pretty junky, there are now massively phone number stuffed pages coming up in the results any more. Def a step in the right direction! Kudos Google

Today Google announced yet another Anti Webspam update to the Algorithm (Google Update). They have been more proactive in recent months than ever. I personally feel this is due to that absolutely abismal search results that we have been seeing lately. What used to be a solid, clean and consistent search results have been scraping the bottom of the barrel. I Welcome with open arms all of the pro active changes and adjustments they have been making and think they are long over due.

In this update Google targets

• Keyword Stuffing
• Link Schemes
• Cloaking
• Duplicate Content

Most interesting to me is Google gives a specific example of Links inserted within the body of content not making grammatical or topic sense to the theme or topic. Which means they are TRULY analyzing and making an effort to understand the theme of a paragraph and whether the link to a site within that text has any sort of content match itself.

Here is their example of that:

Google goes on to say that these changes are geared towards upholding the quality guidelines and to promote quality content. Both of which have always been the case. I think they have gotten ebhind the ball here for awhile on webspam, and are chasing their tales now. Hopefully they will continue to be proactive and in addition confront and admit to Negative SEO being a reality due to their webspam signals being easily abused for evil as well.

The bottom line is the same as it’s always been and that is: CONTENT IS KING! High quality original content that entices engagement, shares and is relevant to your topic will help more than anything.  Google is sending a clear message, a long overdue one and I hope they continue.

Google states that the initial update will effect about 3.1% of queries in English