If you design your site purely for search engines and not for web surfers, the search engines may downgrade your site because of over-optimization. This can be a real pain in the *** when you are trying to rank high, but you don’t see results.
World its greatest search engine Google has an algorithm that can detect over-optimized websites. If they find any over-optimized websites, Google is downgrading them. This over-optimized filter from Google is also called the -950 penalty, because that is what happens. Your over-optimized website will be downgraded 950 positions.
Every webmaster wants the best for their websites, thats obvious. There is a good change you are over-optimizing your website without notice it. If you read a lot of SEO forums, blogs or sites and you follow all their tips and tricks, than you have a big chance you will over-optimize your site. Don’t do everything other webmasters are saying.
Limit your optimization with the best and most effective tactics. What the best and most effective tactics are, you have to find out yourself. But don’t find it out on 1 website. Set a few websites online only for testing. Watch how they evolve and learn from it. Here is a small video of Matt Cutts in which he also mentions over-optimization as a reason for ranking problems.
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June 27th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
I never try to write my blog post titles for keywords. I just write what I write. I think it’s worth more in the eyes of Google to have unique content then stuffing your work with keywords.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
True, thats why they have this filter hehe
It is good to have some keywords in it, for your serps and rankings.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
I think the times of straight black hat methods are over . . . . people are going to have to come up with better techniques than content generators
June 28th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
950 positions is horrific! I’m pretty sure my sites are nowhere near as optimized as they even should be.
June 29th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Over optimization will deter human visitors and some people just don’t get the BIG picture. Yes, do the things that the search engines need (spider food) like a custom title on each page, etc., but remember that we are writing for humans in the end. Great post!
June 29th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
You said it 100 % right David!
June 30th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Everything in excess makes badly.
July 4th, 2007 at 6:29 am
fell free to over optimize me sites anyday.
September 15th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
[…] at the beginning. On every page, the keywords should represent 3 to 4 % of the total content. Don’t overuse keywords on pages, this will be marked as a keyword hog by search engines and they will pass it […]
October 11th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
[…] As you can see I was not using the keyword in the above phrase. That is because I want to prevent over optimization. […]
March 8th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I watched video its wonderfull