Does Google regard SEO as spam is a legitimate question particularly after the announcement they made only last week in which they stated that search terms would be encrypted for signed-in users.

Lost keyword referral data

Effectively, what that means is that both professional SEO’s and pro-active site owners would lose valuable keyword search referral data from upto 10% of searches made (Google’s estimate).

That might not seem a great deal and nothing to be concerned about but is it likely to remain at that level? Perhaps not!

As a Googler I have a Google+, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, Analytics accounts and more. I’m often logged in at various times and a lot of the time particularly with Google+ remain logged in without really realising.

As the Google+ universe expands (currently about 40m users) since being opened up for general use and the expected launch of ‘business’ pages that figure is likely to rise.

But to answer the question…

Matt Cutts head of Google’s anti spam squad has said, “We don’t consider SEO to be spam,” adding  “SEO is a valid way to help people find what they’re looking for via search engines.”

He did speak about unethical SEOs in the market, as in the black hat SEOs that are spamming the web but, stressed that SEO as a whole is not spam.

There are plenty of professional search marketers out there that work within the guidelines, and do not spam.

Which I suppose is good news but there is still a lot of scepticism surround the move.

How do you think it will impact on your SEO?

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