[getbak]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

- google is in the process of making significant changes to searching, putting emphasis on semantic searching rather than keyword searching. You may end up paying a lot of money for keyword search optimizations, only to find that the methods you paid for aren't necessarily obsolete, but no longer optimal.

Not only may it not be optimal, they're looking at punishing "overly optimized" sites.

From a talk at SXSW last week: http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/17/no...rly-optimized/

Normally we don’t pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working in the last few months and hopefully in the coming weeks we hope to release it. The idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly doing their SEO – compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we are trying to level the playing field a bit. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.