Wizard - 7:55 pm on Feb 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

There is a lot of truth in 'do nothing at all' tactics. The times, when you could cheat SE, are almost gone. Internet was meant a place of sharing information, not making money, and inventing all these penalties was the only possible way to try to get rid of commercial sites fighting their SERPS with tricks, and open top positions in results for informative sites again.

If I'm doing search for 'widgets', am I looking for information about the widgets, or for site that sells them?! If I were looking for widgets online shopping, I'd do 'widgets shop' search, wouldn't I?!

New Google algos are going in direction of forcing us to make sites valuable for users. For example, the outbound links issue: if you want your site ranking high, you'd better link to some valuable on-topic sites. It means, you have to provide some valuable information.

It's a matter of time, when Google will include HTML parser able to see all css and js tricks used by SEO, or maybe they are doing it already? Maybe some of these people complaining of falling in SERPS just forgot to mention, that they used css to hide stuffed keywords or js to hide affiliate links?

If you're really advanced in all web-related technologies, and you're real SEO expert, you could still devise some tricks to boost your SERPS. But you'd never know, when they would lead to penalty, because Google has smart guys working to detect the tricks, and knowing the algo, the can easily predict what tricks will SEOs play.

So in long-term web projects, it's much wiser to do just an optimisation, to make site readable for crawler, and to make PageRank concentrating on desired sections of your page, and focus on natural content building which will attract users.