Google's SEO plans for your real estate website

This post comes to us from the Properties Online blog:

Google, as usual, is busy updating and developing its search quality. Summer 2013 has brought several SEO changes, and Matthew Cutts, a member of Google's Search Quality Team, says that small to medium businesses will be in a position to reap the rewards of the changes. In a recent video blog, Matt talks about Google's SEO plans for your real estate website – by way of Google's scheduled summer initiatives.

SEO for Google is focused around a better quality user experience and better support for webmasters. Matt specifies "regular" webmasters here – the good guys trying to provide a good web experience. He tells us that if we do our job to provide great and compelling sites that users love, tell their friends about, bookmark, return to and share, that his team will work hard on the other end to support those efforts. Sounds great, right?

Now, creating that great site (if you haven't done so already) is the stuff of another blog post. For now, I'll recap Google's SEO plans for Summer 2013, as told by Matt Cutts.

• Google has recently deployed version 2.0 of Penguin. It includes web spam changes that are dedicated to targeting black hat web spam, and to address the practice of black hat web spam in a deeper and more impactful way. Black hat web spam is all about shortcuts and dirty deals – trying to achieve higher page rankings through shady techniques like keyword stuffing and link schemes. These deceptive techniques don't benefit web visitors at all and can get in the way of your genuine content showing up in a potential client's search.

• Google will also be looking at advertorials that violate its quality guidelines. There will be stronger enforcement on advertorials not floating page rank, and efforts to make it explicitly clear and obvious when a link ranks high because it's paid, not because it's organic.

• Queries will be cleaned up in several ways – expect better results on your searches by the end of the summer.

• Work continues on net generation detection of hack sites. Key to this area of development is the roll out of better communication with webmasters and the release of a single source of webmaster tools. If you've been hacked, it's going to get a lot easier to get the help you need, as Google will also provide more concrete examples and more sample URLs for diagnostic purposes.

• And one last exciting development is that Google is working on a lot of ways to detect if someone is an authority in a specific space. So if you really are a real estate expert, and you've done a bang up job of conveying that expertise through your website, you're going to rank higher.

"We've got a lot of changes to help small- to medium-busineses," says Matt.

"High five," I say.

To view the original article, visit the Properties Online blog.