Search Engine Optimization

Dangers of Over-Optimization

Posted by Dave The Seo Fool on May 15, 2009 | No Comments

I have been talking or rather writing a lot about search engine optimization and how it can help your website or blog. A lot of information about it is freely available all over the internet. Now, there’s one thing that we don’t speak so often of and from which you should be very careful. Like we always say, don’t overdo it.

If proper SEO can help your search engine ranking, rest assure that over-optimization can destroy it.

That’s right, doing too much good things for your site is bad because it’s unnatural. Although SEO helps to rank well in the search engines, one must rest assure that search engines don’t like those manipulations.

Like I try to emphasize often, there’s a fine line between optimization and spam…

When you over-optimize you can easily fall into the spammer criteria, even without you noticing it or having any intention to do so.

Google 950

Like people, search engines don’t like to be told or forced to do something, if they push you in one direction, you are likely to go the other way. It’s the same with the search engines.

If your optimization doesn’t look natural to the search engines, they will feel that you are trying to influence them and they will penalize you for it, like the infamous Google 950.

What is Google 950? Simple, the Google algorithms check your site for potential spamming within your on-page optimization. If you are considered as a potential spammer, your ranking will drop around 950 places (where the name). That’s quite bad…

Clearly, the goal of Google is to eliminate as much trash sites from spammers as possible and we can’t blame them for that. In fact, if you look at the results around the 950, they are doing a pretty good job. Unfortunately, good innocent website do get caught in the net too from time to time.

Note that the Google 950 algorithm is automated and not human reviewed.

Just know that you don’t want to be one of those unfortunate website.

Accidental Over-Optimization

Of course, since you are reading my posts, I know for a fact that you are not a spammer type, so why should I warn you about it? Like I said before, it is very easy to have a site that looks like spam for the crawlers, even without your intention.

Let me illustrate this for you. Imagine you are optimizing your site for “keyword analysis”, without spamming or using black hat SEO, you would optimize your site naturally as follows:

Your Page Title would be “Keyword Analysis”
You would have “Keyword Analysis” in “H1″ title for your content.
“keyword analysis” would be spread all over your page.
The “alt” and “title” tags of your picture would also include “keyword analysis”.
You would also have navigation links that starts with “keyword analysis” like “About keyword analysis”, “My Keyword Analysis Services” etc…
Your HTML pages names may even include “keyword analysis” like “about-keyword-analysis.html”.
You may also offer additional “Keyword analysis resources”

Well, all these optimization are perfectly legitimate and in no way black hat SEO, but try to look at it from a bit further, from a crawler point of view…

Your site looks like a spammer website trying to push with his stuffing of “keyword analysis”!

So how can you prevent this?

SEO Going Natural

Like I said before, the best SEO is the “natural” one with a small twist only. Do work around a specific keyword, but just don’t overdo it.

Here are my recommendations:

Do have your keyword in your Page title.
Do have your keyword in your content title.
Do give images their real name. If one of your images is about a blue landscape, don’t call it “Keyword Analysis” call it “blue landscape”.

For the rest, do write your content naturally. The reason why I say that is not only you are unlikely to over stuff your keyword by writing naturally, in addition you’ll provide good alternative keyword terms for your site.

In Conclusion

By writing naturally, you’ll use your keyword “keyword analysis” but also variations like “search terms” or “keyword study” and many other variations that are as relevant to the search engines than for your readers, and best of all your won’t be tagged as a spammer!

Let your content rule!

Nicolas Prudhon is a SEO Strategist with over 10 years of experience, as well as a published author.

His SEO Help Blog features all his articles dedicated to show you how to unleash the power of WEB2.0 in your optimization quest for your human visitors and the search engines.

His site also features a SEO Help Forum where you can get all your questions answered.

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