Over optimization Penalties in Google – Myth or Reality?

Over optimization Penalties in Google – Myth or Reality?

Your website is very well optimized for the search engines, and you're quite pleased that you did it all with "white hat" SEO tactics. But your ranking suddenly dropped in Google. What happened? Your site just might be "over-optimized." Read on to find out what could cause this problem, and what to do about it.

Can a site that contains relevant keyword-rich content and is appropriately optimized for search engines be penalized? The issue of an over-optimization penalty in Google came to my attention after I’d seen one of my client’s sites disappear from Google (not completely, but enough of a drop to be invisible to the average searcher). I posted a question about why this would happen in an SEO forum, being careful to state that the only thing we’d done was begin a link placement campaign in earnest. I speculated in my post that the link placement may have been the cause since we were getting links fast, albeit by hand, by employing one dedicated soul to spend a few hours a day requesting reciprocal links and adding the client’s site to directories.

I mentioned that the site was very well-optimized and all SEO tactics were white-hat. I was shocked when several people suggested the pages dropped in Google were overoptimized. Let me take a step back here and define the difference between “white hat” SEO and spam (e.g., using “black hat” techniques).

What constitutes a well-optimized page?

A page that is considered well-optimized for search engines contains several standard components which you are probably aware of if you are reading this article. These include title tags, meta keyword and description tags, keyword-rich header, link and body text, alt tags and a generous set of links to other pages on the site that search engines can follow (e.g., text links instead of images links). This hypothetical page will repeat the keyword whenever it is natural and relevant to do so, no more and no less. There will be no repeating of keywords in any of the above-mentioned components, no invisible text or text that is too small for the naked eye to perceive (all “black hat” tactics).This page may also contain the keyword somewhere in either the URL or the filename (e.g., www.mydomain.com/keyword.html). It seems perfect, but could it be too perfect?

I generally give myself a pat on the back after I’ve completed optimizing a page using the above (white hat) tactics. Hey, it’s not always easy to hit all the components of a well-optimized page in a natural and meaningful way. To this end, I don’t force the issue because I understand that we are first and foremost writing for visitors and not search engines. Over-optimization penalties, if they do exist, really tread the fine line between good SEO and spam. This is fairly black and white for me – it’s either spam or it isn’t spam. However, it occurred to me that a search engine such as Google could be programmed to detect different levels of spam.


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