The High Price of SEO Failure - Penalization, Banning and Over Optimization
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Penalization, Banning
If you don’t optimize your site correctly, you can rack up some severe penalties or possibly even get banned in the search engines. Search engines constantly seek to whittle out those sites that are not relevant in a search, or are perceived as spam. If your site is penalized for mistakes, it won’t appear to searchers, and the search engine traffic will be non-existent. While it is difficult to place a value on lost sales, every business has to take into account how lost sales affect their profits.
One of the natural consequences of being penalized or banned for these things is the difficulty in climbing back up in the SERPs. Remember the Traffic Power fiasco? Traffic Power is the poster-child of what not to do in search engine optimization. If you use cloaking, hidden text, devious linking strategies, doorway pages or any other deceptive technique that's only for manipulating search engines then you can be sure that your web site will be banned.The companies that got caught in the middle of the entire Traffic Power ordeal had, and some still have, a hard time starting over, because of the black mark assessed to their sites. The consequences for these types of mistakes are poor ranking and no traffic.
Result: No traffic = no sales
Over Optimization
Over optimizing your site can be perceived as search engine spam. Filling your pages with nonsensical keywords looks to a search engine as if you are attempting to get your site listed for keywords that have nothing to do with what your site is all about. Keyword stuffing is a good example of over optimization. Another form of over optimization comes in the form of duplicate pages. More is better right? Not necessarily. Search engines are interested in unique content. Unique means “the only one like it”. This is the opposite of duplicate, which means “more than one”. Over Optimization Penalties, or OOPs, are particularly infamous in Yahoo. The nature of an OOP is that it filters out sites that are over optimized, so that in essence, they “…never leave the gate”.
Let’s look at a website I analyzed recently that deals with migraine headaches. When I analyzed the page that deals with migraine treatment, it was almost comical. Of the four keywords in the meta tags, the word “migraine” was three of them; the term “migraine headache” made up 43% of the body text. Needless to say, this site ranks very poorly in the SERPs, if at all. This is a good example of over optimization.
Again, the consequences for this type of mistake are poor ranking and no traffic.
Result: No traffic = No sales.
Next: Hiring Unscrupulous SEOs >>
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