Legitimate SEO 'on the rise'

8th September 2008

An increasing number of people are shunning black hat search engine optimisation (SEO) in favour of more legitimate tactics, according to Google's Matt Cutts.

The search engine has seen the number of websites utilising overly aggressive SEO campaigns involving elements such as spam and link farms fall in recent times, he told CNET News.com.

This can be partly attributed to Google's work to combat such tactics in the form of exclusively created algorithms that close down infringing content, as well as manual approaches to offending websites, Mr Cutts explained.

"Google is good at detecting machine-generated spam, so we don't see much of that these days," the engineer commented.

Mr Cutts told USA Today in June that maintaining a regularly updated blog and filling in HTML tags can help to provide a significant boost to search engine rankings for online businesses, as can deploying keyword-based techniques in moderation.