Capital Hosting

In late spring 2012, Google began to release information about over optimization penalties that it was implementing in its search ranking algorithms. Although they still haven’t offered a lot of information about what exactly counts as over optimization, anecdotal evidence and a lot of testing from passionate SEO minds have produced a basic outline about avoiding penalties and recovering from them.

This isn’t the same thing as Penguin, which catches link-stuffing and other obvious black-hat techniques that anyone should be able to identify with the naked eye. Instead, the intent of over optimization penalties is “basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people… “overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.”

That gives a little insight. But from this quote, you’d think you couldn’t get knocked down in rankings for over optimization if you’ve never tried to SEO your site. But a SEOmoz.com writer had the exact opposite experience. His personal blog was de-ranked for some very specific search terms despite having never optimized it at all and only having a handful of inbound links.

This doesn’t mean you should panic if you SEO your site. Instead, you should focus on three things. First, monitor your analytics or make sure your inbound marketing company is doing so. Any time you change something about your site or there’s a data refresh, it’s possible for crawlers and algorithms to re-rank your site much lower. You want to catch that immediately so you can fix the problem, whether it’s over optimization or anything else.

Second, focus on offering good content and building links with others in the industry in such a way that you’re helping users. Customer-centric SEO will almost never raise over-optimized triggers. For example, the SEOmoz writer deduced that one of his own old websites was causing the problem because the anchor text for links to his blog was stuffed with keywords. In this example, he tested more natural anchor text that still had keywords, and the old rankings returned within a day. This is a clear case where altering the SEO tool to seem less spammy and more useful enabled him to avoid the ranking penalty.

Lastly, cut the pure SEO white-hat strategies. For example, paid link exchanges at high volumes is a strategy that Google put on the shortlist of things it wanted to penalize. The more a strategy is basically a direct link between money and rankings without a user-centered stop, like useful content, along the way, the more likely it is Google will penalize you.

Over optimization penalties are a reality. But they should only affect a very small number of websites that aren’t actually engaging in mildly questionable rank farming strategies. As long as you have a basic idea of what could cause the penalty and are keeping an eye on ranking and analytics, you should be fine.

---

Article by John V. Learn more about over optimization penalties and how you can avoid them at http://www.wpromote.com.

Related Posts