Regarding Matt Cutts’ statement that Google may come up with an “over-optimization” penalty in the future to help sites that aren’t showing up as highly in search results because of other sites that might have excessive links pointed to them or contain specific keywords more often, you can get the sense that this is something Google has been aiming at for years by looking at many of the patent filings and whitepapers from the company.

For instance, one patent that I wrote about in October of last year described how Google might identify when site owners take over other sites and use them to create links to their sites, using pages from the acquired sites as doorway pages. That can include links that might be part of private blog networks, or from individual pages that aren’t part of such networks.

Google’s Phrase-Based indexing approach also includes a method that might help to identify web spam based upon a statisically unusually high amount of related co-occurring phrases appearing upon a page.

Another Google patent that I wrote about a couple of years ago, Google’s Affiliated Page Link Patent, described how Google might limit the amount of PageRank that flowed from pages on one site to pages on another that appeared to be related in some manner, such as being under the same ownership or having some other close relationship.

An aim of good SEO is to improve the quality, relevance, and usability of pages for visitors, so that the objectives of the owners of those pages are furthered, and people actually looking for what is offered on those pages are more likely to find those pages. Optimization, as a term, means to make something the best that you can, and in SEO usually aims at making a page the best that one can in terms of satisfying people using a query term that the page is about, to meet their informational or situational or transactional needs.

So a penalty like this might do things like ignore the value of anchor text in blog comments or forum signatures pointing to pages, lessen the value of links between sites that are related in some manner, lessen the value of keywords or related terms that appear on the same page at a very high rate, or apply some other similar approaches.

One of the most popular services for building backlinks to web sites is closing up shop. BuildMyRank has officially announced on their site that they are closing their site down due to Google de-indexing a ton of their sites and no longer being able to provide a quality service to their customers.

Keywords are easy to manipulate; intent, not so much. In order to rank well in semantic search, you don’t just have to put your keywords in the right places, you have to figure out the actual meaning behind those keywords and create content around that specifically. That puts more emphasis on your keyword research.

When people search, they aim to answer a question. They just search in the truncated version of that question. Keyword research is largely data-driven around the popularity of the terms in their question. Keyword research in semantic search will have to focus on what that person actually means when searching for that keyword.

For example: Yoga. What could people mean they search “yoga?”

• What is yoga?
• The different types of yoga
• How to do different yoga positions
• The best fit of yoga pants
• Yoga exercise videos

The possibilities are endless. When you’re framing your content in a semantic search world, it has to be around answering the specific questions people have as it relates to that keyword. With every sentence you write, ask yourself: How does this answer the searcher’s question? You will have to focus on the natural language even if those users are still focusing on keywords.

With Knowledge Graph, Google will now be answering questions itself, instead of relying on another website to provide the information. (You’re probably already seeing some of this in action.) So, not only will you have to be competing with companies for ranking, exposure and clicks in Google, but you’re competing against Google itself. And users aren’t going to leave something familiar like a result page to go to a website they’ve never heard of before.