swerve - 7:32 pm on Jul 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

Great post, John.

I have thought about this too recently. Here is a question that I think professional SEOs should contemplate: Given your experience and knowledge about Google and SEO, do you think you can help a client's pages rank higher than other, more-relevant pages? If the answer to this question is yes, and if Google's goal is to provide the most relevant results to users, it would make sense that Google would want to make some changes to ensure (user) relevancy of search results.

That said, I don't know how successful they would be at attempting to identify "over-optimized" sites in order to improve relevancy. Keyword density, overuse of <h1> tags, and anchor text-stuffing are not as cut-and-dried as something like hidden-text. The best solution, I think, would be better semantic page analysis algorithms - algorithms that do a better job understanding what a page is about. This would allow Google to rely less on other scoring factors such as keywords, titles, and <h1> tags.