Over-Optimization Penalty – A Comeback

While speaking in a presentation, Matt Cutts said that the new over-optimized penalty would be imposed on the websites that do SEO above normal. This update has made many SEO companies a bit scary as now they will get a penalty for the hard work they have been doing for years, or we can say getting punished for trying to make Google happy!

Over Optimization is the practice of applying many SEO techniques, to the point until Google catches you because you are focussing more on it rather than on giving Quality content to your customers and finally ruining your website. In the old SEO days, Over Optimization was the way from which the sites gained traffic easily. The best way to boost your site was stuffing thousands of keywords or sending thousands of spammy links to the a site. But now the scenario has changed, as now the SEO’s knows that stuffing and spammy links are a way to suicide. After over Optimization Penalty, many things become black hat making SEOs more wiser about Google techniques.

SEO is in a constant state of evolving. This evolution shows that google is getting smarter, by which searches are also getting smarter which is ultimately making the SEOs smarter, leaving the battleground messy and hot. To win the battle, we should know what over optimization techniques we should not apply.

Building Backlinks only from Relevant Blogs:

To attract Google, people create a thousand of backlinks pointing towards them. This creates a problem when Google finally figures out that your competitors are having an average of 40 backlinks and you are having 5 times of it. This will surely raise a red flag and even your thousands of backlinks could not save you. So, it’s better to have backlinks from a relevant blog. Try not to use paid links, use guest blogging or blog commenting. You should not always create backlinks for your homepage, your internal pages should also be backlinked from relevant subjects. Also creating 100s of backlinks in short span of time is a symbol of Over Optimization.

 

The Default Language of your Content is “Spamglish”:

Here we are talking about Keyword Stuffing. Unnaturally Stuffing your content with keywords is now considered as Black Hat SEO and now comes in Over Optimisation. The percentage of a keyword in a content shows google that whether you have targeted search engines or people. So filling of your special keywords should not be more than 2-5%. You can also try synonyms and long tailed phrases to avoid penalty and increase Optimization.

 

Placing Clicks above Usability:

Well, you also know that Google is smarter than you. He knows you are doing SEO just for gaining clicks and are ignoring the design and usability of the website. This will surely raise a Red Flag against you. You should give importance to the fact that if your site in not that much user friendly then Google will also start hating you. You must focus on your website design, navigation and other user friendly factors. This will naturally increase the clicks.

 

Multiple H1 tags:

An H1 tag is for the page’s main Heading. In old times, SEOs figure out that the Google give importance to H1 tags. They also started giving importance to H1 tags. Gradually this importance took the face of “Over Optimization”. Many websites that were having multiple H1 tags had suffered badly after the Over Optimization penalty rule. So it’s better to have only 1 H1 tag for your website although you can have any number of other tags.

 

Linking to toxic Sites:

Links from websites having low DA, spammy links or other toxicity will decrease the ranking of your website. Don’t waste your time in sending outbound links to these kind of websites. Instead try building links from healthy websites with good DA and reputation. It will be a time consuming work but is surely worth it !