
Penguin and Panda Series
Part1: Google Penguin and Google Panda Penalty - What's that?
Part2: Top 10 SEO Strategies To Protect your blog Against Google Panda Update
Part3: How To Recover From Google Penguin Update Penalty?
Part4: When will the next Google Penguin Update Take Place?
Part5: How to identify SEO Over Optimized blog or website?
Part6: What is the ideal Word limit for an optimized Blog Post?

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 MBT, 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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