SEO Over Optimization Penalty: What Should You Do To Avoid This?
Not long ago since Matt Cutts – Head of webspam cop of Google Inc. announced that there will be another update to Google’s algorithm to make googlebot smarter and to “level the playing ground”. This implies that SEO too much is not as good as we think now.
Being a good webmaster/blogger, you must be aware of SEO to make your sites easily indexed or your articles get higher rankings in SERPs against your competitors of the same keyword but if you do too much SEO for your keywords, you will possibly be considered spam/abuse and Google will punish you for some thing called “SEO over optimization”.
over optimization SEO Over Optimization Penalty: What Should You Do To Avoid This?
From my own perspective of SEO and optimization, I think that Google is trying to kill all kinds of dirty SEO or black hat SEO techniques to give opportunities to websites with fresh and quality content. This is fair to all of us because sometimes original content has lower ranking against those who copy it.
Let’s see what Matt Cutts said at the SXSW on March 10 about SEO over optimization and be ready for it:
What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.
From the transcription, we will know that keywords stuffing or too many exchange links to a page will be considered overly SEO and Googlebot easily identifies this trick as most of exchange links are one way.
What Should We Do To Avoid SEO Over Optimization Penalty?
Creating quality and original contents: Content is the king, this has been admitted and quality content will live forever with any future changes of search engines. If you can create quality and original content, you are just fine with this update.
Don’t exchange links/backlinks too much with the same optimized anchor text: Exchanging links sometimes is just a way to share backlinks but it does not work as it is two ways links. However, one way backlinks with the same optimized anchor text is now also considered SEO over optimization.
Don’t use generic keyword domain name with brand names: Many of you have been aware that Google has already show brand related searches in SERPs pages. Further, Google has just requested GoDaddy to block nearly 800 domain names that have google brand or variables. You can see the full list here. My advice is that don’t use brand name for your domain to avoid penalty.
Guest blogging on relevant niche sites: Yes, this has been discussed several times and now it seems the most popular way that you can SEO for your sites. Guest blogging on relevant niche sites is the safest and valuable method that can avoid over-optimization penalty. Google can’t punish you when you are doing a great guest article on a site that is relevant to your niche.
Don’t change your home to your most valuable keyword: Your original keyword is A but after sometimes, you are getting a lot traffic from a B keyword and you change your main keyword to B, that is what Google does not like and I would advise you not to do so now.
Frankly, it is hard to pre-announce what exactly Google will do in the next updates but from what we heard and what we have learnt so far, these steps can surely help your sites have a good standing in the SERPs.
What do you think about this? Any ideas that you might have in mind to share in order to avoid over-optimization penalty?