Head of
Google's web-spam team, Matt Cutts, said in March that Google has been
working on penalizing overly optimized sites for the past few months. He
explained that with this, Google plans to level the battlefield so that
no one has an advantage, and the top rankings are determined by
brute strength, i.e. good content, rather than cunning tricks (black hat
SEO). This way, sites with little SEO but good content will come up,
while sites with extra SEO but poor content will go down. So let's now
talk about what things entail over-optimization, and how you can detect
or avoid it.
What an over optimization penalty entails?
Despite
clear statements from Google such as "crackdown on black hat SEO", the
idea as to what actually incurs Google's displeasure is still vague.
Google doesn't let people in on the secrets. As they said;
While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics
But
gathering facts from the messages and notices Google has been putting
out, we can get a general idea as to what things we should avoid. Here
are some over optimization practices that you need to stay away from.
Bad inbound links
Recently,
Google started giving out lots of warning messages to webmasters
through the Webmaster tool, informing them about some bad linking
structures with their sites. Here at Blogger Tips & Tricks,
we always discourage buying backlinks. These are bad, automated links.
So take a look at what sort of links you have. Start using Google
Webmaster Tool to get notified.
Another fairly common practice
is making inbound links from other websites one might own. Usually,
people create multiple sites to supplement their main site. These sites,
of course are low quality. Some people might even employ automated
mechanisms to make these side-websites look genuine. So if you have
links coming to your website from other sites you own, then this
practice falls into the category of over-optimization.
Link anchor text is also very important. Anchor text is the text that displays instead of the actual link. For example, Google
is the anchor text for the link www.google.com. Now if many of your
inbound links have the same anchor text, then it hints at automation.
This usually happens when you buy backlinks, which is why you should
never do that.
Cloaking and hidden text
Now
you might not be aware about you backlinks, but you sure as hell know
what you are doing when you hide or cloak some content. This is a
ruthless black hat SEO technique. Cloaking means hiding some content
from the search engine, or displaying a version of some text to the
search engine that is different from the one presented to the user. This
is usually used in over-promotion, phishing, etc.
Hidden text is text that is made
invisible to the readers so that they can't see what they're clicking
on. This trick can be achieved by playing around with colors. For
example, white text won't show against a white background. These
techniques are unethical, and cheap. And you should never use them.
High keyword density
Using
too many keywords in your titles, meta descriptions, intro paragraphs
etc is considered as over-optimization, since putting up more keywords
is a desperate attempt at gaining a search engine's attention. Google
has started penalizing sites that have a high keyword density. Usually,
anything above 2-3% density is high.
Excessive interlinking
Interlinking
content within your site is a great SEO practice. We always recommend
people to interlink more often. But there's a catch. In an attempt for
over-optimization, some webmasters interlink so much that there are more
than a couple links in any given post pointing at the same page. And to
make matters worse, they might even link repeatedly to their home
pages. Well that, my friends, is a recipe for disaster.
Improper heading structure
H1
tags are a lot more appealing to search engines than other tags. So
some people use multiple h1 tags to gain attention. Well that is just
plain wrong. Always use one, and only one h1 tag per page. Use h2 and h3
tags for headings and subheadings.
Too many redirects
Now
if you have changed the file name for a page, then redirects are okay.
But redirecting just for the sake of gaining ad income or directing you
to affiliate pages is just sad. Too many redirects, and Google will
catch you spamming.
Duplicate content
It
often happens that those who are unable to write good quality content,
they resort to these over optimization tactics. And since they don't
have much content to write about, they re-use their content a lot. While
quotes and stuff are okay, but copying paras from old posts and
rephrasing them is wrong.
Pop-ups
You
know someone's desperate when you see pop-up ads on their websites.
While pop-ups themselves are bad, some webmasters make it even worse.
They deceive users by designing an exit 'cross' button where a cross
would normally be. And when someone wants to close the ad, they click
this button, which is actually a link to an ad or something. While this
ensures a high click-through rate, it is highly unethical, and must
never be used.
Well, here were the basic
over-optimization tactics that you should avoid. If you are using them,
then I'd advice you to let go of them. If you've been hit by Google as a
result of these tactics, you can always read other posts in this series
to get a better idea. Good luck with your Panda and Penguin recovery :)
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