Overly Optimized Websites Hurt SEO

Posted: March 30, 2012

In a great article by Barry Densa on his blog MarketingWitandWisdom.com, Barry identifies the concept of Google penalizing, a.k.a. “slapping”, your website for being overly optimized. He also goes into detail about what that means and would be worthwhile to read the entire post.

My (still true) philosophy is creating great content and value on a website that people naturally want to link (vote for) to your website. You can increase site rankings in the search engine if you do this. You can’t trick your way to top anymore and buying links or paying someone to make a bunch of irrelevant posts on other websites is the fastest way to get “slapped” by Google.

Many people don’t understand SEO or are knowledgeable enough to be dangerous. They think they can write a bunch of Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and add the keyword 5.7% of time on their website. The artistic side to the equation is balancing those tactics with a strategy of adding value to the website visitor. If you’re #1 in the search engine, are driving 100,000 visitors a day, and every single visitor leaves the first page they hit because the content is not helpful. You’re going to eventually get penalized.

The Google “Slap”

Matt Cutts, head of the Google Webspam team said this at SXSW in Austin.

…We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there’s something we’ve been working on over the last few months and hope to release it in the next few months or few weeks. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or over SEO – versus those creating great content and a fantastic website – we’re going to level the playing field. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance more adaptive, and, we are also looking for those who abuse it, like using too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links, or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

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