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If you have over optimized your website, it’s time you take a look and revamp. Or else you will get the undesired GOOGLE SLAP! Google is planning to roll out the Over Optimization Penalty. The info below is taken from a speech from Matt Cutts at the South by Southwest (SXSW) panel hosted by Search Engine Land’s Editor-in-Chief, Danny Sullivan.
Penalties:
As we all know, Google rarely does anything at half-measure. Traditionally, sites that violated filter algorithms like Panda took a hit in rankings, but the penalty for over-optimization is de-indexing. That’s right – if you’re penalized, you are removed from the Google index and the bots stop crawling your site, which means that you are invisible to the search engine.
Here is a list of things that Google HATES!:
There are over 200 signals that comprise the database of potential abuses, and the Google Bot assesses confluences of these factors to identify sites that are over-optimizing. Be on the safe side: don’t do any of them. Here are some of the strongest signals:
- Excessive keyword density – typically, anything more than 2-3% is too much. If your site crunches 3 to 4 keywords into its title, heading, meta description, and body content with 7% density, don’t be surprised when Google slaps you with a penalty.
- Inorganic or paid inbound links – you know you shouldn’t be doing this anyway. Strictly keyword-rich internal links – are you only linking to your internal sites with keywords? That’s another no-no.
- Listing keywords on the site – it makes me physically ill when I see a list of conspicuous keywords, usually all tagged with internal links, at the bottom of a page. This is sometimes done when a site is attempting to appeal to a broad base and stuffs internally-linked keywords anywhere in the body of the site to artificially boost rankings.
- Ugly site design – sites that rely on SEO manipulation rarely put in the effort or resources to create an aesthetically appealing, user-friendly site design. Weak content – if your site is re-hashing material from other websites and offers uninspiring content with a low value, you’re exposing yourself to a penalty.
- Few or zero value propositions – a value proposition is something that provides value to the searcher. Not only are these important to conversion, but the lack of one will make your site suspect. What are you offering your reader? An e-book? A white paper? A free consultation? Make it count. You brought them to your site for a reason, didn’t you?
- Domain name is keyword – did you buy kidsafegardensupplies.com for its SEO benefit? You might have wasted your cash. While this won’t trigger an automatic penalty, it is on the over-optimization checklist. All “home” link anchors in the site navigation use the keyword – this was long thought to be clever, but now it’s written off as a cheap trick.
- Excessive back-linking – if all of your back-links have the same anchor text and all point to your main URL, you’re in the danger zone. Please note, however, that organic back-links with unique anchor texts that lead to specific landing pages, articles, or blog posts are very healthy for your ranking. Back-linking to untrustworthy sites – if you’re linking to a low quality site, you may be exposing yourself to a penalty.
- Duplicate content – content duplication is when you use the same text over and over again on your website, changing only the keywords and links.
- Automatic page re-directs – anything other than a permanent 301 redirect won’t be supported by Google, and could signal that you’re trying to dupe searchers.
- Doorway pages – doorway pages are those that offer no navigation options to the browser, and instead only display affiliate links or advertisements so that the browser either “bounces” (exits) or clicks on an ad to leave the page.
- Excessive H1 tags – all together now: H1 is for the top heading; H2 and H3 for the rest. You should only have one H1 heading per article or page.