Google Search is notorious for often penalizing content that too closely resembles advertising content and so on. Search engine optimization tactics are therefore called keywords, phrases and alignment.

Effective Sitemaps that maximize the quantity of “levant” keywords are essential, as those words are preferred by Google for keywords of content and provide a closer link between your websites.

Although not completely prohibited in most cases, search engine optimization and SEO is now a bad word. It has lately become a bitter topic, and the Sitemaps that are ranked well are reported to be more than 1,000 times more than those that were ranked poorly.

The trend was first triggered when Google filtered branded links from Google Play.

In May of 2018, the search engine yellow-slashed the reputation of “Organically powered websites” that claim to be without a paid-for link scheme.

A few months after this was first reported, Google’s Director of Web Content went on “Conversations on Sitemaps”, where she “elaborated on the lengthy, in-depth answers to your questions, not only from us, but from Google’s experts in the field.” She conducted three separate conversations, one in the US, another in UK and the third in Malaysia, where she identified the issues faced by Sitemaps at the moment. She emphasized that “link schemes can result in high rankings, however, Google is focused on these link schemes that are legitimate, not those that are fake.”

Although Google’s lead Sitemaps expert clarified that it was a case of keyword matching (link schemes) rather than link schemes, what started it all was many brand-names removing their links, particularly from links to retailers. She discussed, “the overwhelming amount of link spam on our index of webpages, also known as click-bait content.”

Now brands in search engines, who only used to be in search engines through links to other retailers’ websites, have to declare themselves and that will result in a delay or re-classification.

And don’t use any keywords with advertisements or in Google Play?

This is mainly because of Google’s Opinion Pages initiative that rewards users for providing opinions, rather than link optimization tactics. According to Google, they are worth much more than links.

And as a consequence of the above, the struggle for long-tail, straight search is gaining ground, at the detriment of article content marketing. In our previous article, we mentioned how SEO can be good and bad for article marketing.

Now we shall summarize why SEO is trying to destroy our marketing tactics.

Purposes and Attributes of SEO

Auerbach and Dvoracek, 2011: Sitemaps may help to identify popular phrases and keywords, because they use “behavioral analysis” by analyzing text content to identify what keywords are often used.

Google, 2015: Google Sitemaps, which are generated from webpages, contains 1,411 results and puts 0.07 percent of its search results in the list of the most-visited pages on its index.

Epson 2012: Certain Sitemaps may include marketing, creative, and technical keywords.

Tomkins, 2011: Incorporation of web pages into Google Sitemaps using keywords as a parameter.

First Pages: Do not use adwords keywords.

Snooth, 2008: Link schemes are a form of keyword game, because they are tied to events. In order to benefit from paid-for-links, it is easier to use network keywords rather than keyword search terms.

Czesawicz and Porpanek, 2014: Does SEM exploit special characters or keywords? Yes, it includes “bilateral ‘S’ characters between common keywords, for both direct marketing and organic traffic.”