Over Optimizing Your Site: Just Say No

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Yes, there is such a thing as an Over Optimization Penalty, and you don't have to be a spammer to trigger it. How can you avoid suffering this penalty? Read on to find out.

You know about the trouble you can get into for keyword stuffing and spammy tactics. You know how much search engines hate that sort of thing. But you might not realize how much those strategies turn off your customers; by extension, they hurt your business even if the search engines don’t penalize your site. And you might be surprised to learn that your site might receive an over optimization penalty even if you haven’t crossed over the line into spamming the search engines.

Let’s be clear about this: there is such a thing as an Over Optimization Penalty (OOP). Search engine marketing expert Bill Hartzer observed that those who have not encountered such a penalty are more likely to be “white hat SEOs” and unwilling to push the limits. But grey hat and certainly black hat SEOs know it exists.

Hartzer gives a classic example of the OOP by describing what happens when you put too much anchor text in your site, “so that all the home page links say `keyword keyword home’ instead of `home.’” This leads to lost search engine rankings a few days later, but within a few days of changing the links back, the rankings return. Hartzer says he can point to many other instances that prove the OOP exists.

So given that there is an over optimization penalty, and that you don’t have to be spamming to trigger it, what can you do? Well, there are certain practices that you really need to avoid. It will help if you keep your main goal in mind, which isn’t just writing to make the search engines happy. Those of you who have been most actively keeping up with new developments in the SEO field may find that I’m covering some familiar ground, but hopefully even the very seasoned professionals will see a few things that are new.

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