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In late spring, Google began to release information about the over-optimization penalties it was implementing in its search ranking algorithms.

Although Google has yet to offer much information about what over-optimization is, anecdotal evidence and a lot of testing from passionate SEO minds have produced a basic outline about how to avoid penalties as well as how to recover from them.

These penalties are not like 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 the over-optimization penalties is an attempt to level the playing field between those who are over-doing their SEO, compared to those who have great content and a great site.

This doesn’t mean you can’t be knocked down in rankings for over-optimization, however, even if you’ve never tried to SEO your site. A SEOmoz.com writer, for instance, had his personal blog de-ranked for some very specific search terms, despite never optimizing it and having only a handful of inbound links.

There is no reason for panic if you do use SEO on 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 something 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 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 to seem less spammy and more useful enabled him to avoid the ranking penalty.

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

Over-optimization penalties are a reality. But they should only affect a very small number of websites that are engaging in 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.

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

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