Tactics to Escape the Over-Optimization Penalties

The famous saying that “too much of a good thing is a bad thing” always remains relevant, and thus it is food for thought to think and rethink. The saying not only fits into real-life scenarios but also for SEO strategies meant for the online business modules. SEO is definitely a good step to bring ample improvement in the website rankings for assured brand building. Don’t forget this fact though that too much of it will equally lead to a case of over-optimization which can resultantly bring unbearable harm as well.

Whenever planning your SEO activities, you should keep this important factor into consideration. Ensure that SEO strategies are properly implemented and right in order. It can make a big difference in business operations.

Search engine over-optimization can be defined as a process of creating too many SEO activities. Continuing such activities can ruin your website’s ability to rank at a certain point in time. It is logically understood that whenever any webmaster starts doing too many SEO improvements all at one go, it is obvious that Google will start assessing such things and thus question why a site is getting so many things at one time. Such monitoring brings to the forefront the cases of over-optimization to rather cause harm instead than getting benefitted.

If you are keen that there shouldn’t be the creation of red flags for the Google bots, then you must work in a planned manner to keep your website at the natural route and thus help maintain its relevance. Make it an ultimate one by improving to provide the best user experience. Having a bit of knowledge of rules and regulations to maintain carefulness will greatly prove beneficial to save the website from being penalized unnecessarily by Google for over-optimization.

Avoid Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a part of the black hat SEO strategy, which has become an obvious way to over-optimize your website. Using keywords is a great idea to help your web pages secure ranking on search engines, but do not force keywords unnaturally. A web page, which is exceptionally written, is liked by both readers and search engines. Include your keywords in body text, H1, Meta Title, Meta Description, and Alt Text naturally.

Over-Optimization Penalty

Whether you are doing an On-Page Over-Optimization or Off-Page Over-Optimization, you must be prepared for Google’s Panda update. The Update was aimed to penalize all those sites with over-optimized content.

When your website is hit by a Panda penalty, you will lose your organic ranking immediately. Over-Optimization penalty may downgrade your organic ranking or exclude your website from the organic search engine index.

Search engines, including Google, do not like over-optimized content. Even your readers will get irritated and leave your web pages without reading. Apart from maintaining optimum keyword density, you should write high-quality, fresh and informative content in order to retain and engage your audience.

Related: What is Fred Update and How to Avoid it

Top 5 Signs You’re Over-Optimizing Your Website

SEO experts at our content agency in India have enlisted below the five key points which Google uses to determine whether a website is over-optimized for SEO and not meant for the readers.

1. Don’t optimize non-relevant keywords

Avoid optimizing the non-relevant keywords of your page. Even if you get ranked for a non-relevant keyword, you will indeed get more harmed than avail something good from it. It will happen due to the increase in your bounce rate. People will start leaving your pages immediately once they realize that your contents weren’t what they had actually been looking for. You must also shun keyword cannibalization practice as it comes under the black hat SEO strategy. It, therefore, has maximum damaging chances.

Related: Know About EMD (Exact Match Domain) Penalty and its Consequences

2. Shun over-optimized content

While generating content for your website, you must remain extra cautious to ensure that they are fresh, quality and natural content prepared for your site. Get your content written by professionals or experts because professionally written content boosts the organic ranking of websites. You can hire an editor to check your content and modify it to suit the industry. Grammatically or factually incorrect content irritates readers.

Related: Benefits of outsourcing content editing service

3. Avoid Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links

Internal linking is a very good SEO strategy for websites. Remember it that any keyword-rich anchor text for internal links would be a red flag activity in the eyes of Google thus you should remain cautious. If you do this activity occasionally, then there are good chances that you obtain its SEO benefits. In case this practice is done excessively, then you will land yourself into a big problem. Apart from the internal linking steps, you must also link out to the high authority websites. It will definitely bring good improvement in your website’s credibility.

4. Keep link building speed in the check

Creating backlinks is the number one activity to improve website ranking. However, if you create too many backlinks in a little time frame then you come to the notice of search engines for suspicious activity. Questions might arise in your mind that how many links are possibly too many backlinks that have the chance to cause possible harm. This question couldn’t be answered for perfect calculation from a genuine source yet. But, webmasters and experts believe that the maximum number of links one should build in a day shouldn’t be more than 30-100 ranges. They must also depend on factors such as the site’s authority, industry, audience, or traffic level.

5. Maintain a healthy link profile

A healthy link profile will have the links pointing to the deep internal pages as well as the Home Page. Links pointing to deep internal pages support SEO, while links to the main navigation pages like “Contact Us,” “About Us,” or “Our Services” can create a red flag for your website. Keep such factors into consideration.

6. Manipulated Titles

Your meta titles and descriptions should not be manipulated. In fact, neither search engines nor readers like manipulative titles. If your readers do not find the solution in your content, they will leave your web pages immediately and thus you will increase your CTR (Click through Rate).

7. Massive Footer

You should know about footer optimization to get SEO benefits. Excessive targeted links in the footer and sidebar targeting to exact match pages can be a bad idea for search ranking. Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically.

8. Low-Quality Backlinks

Apart from links from press release websites or directories, selling or buying backlinks can also get you penalized. Over-optimization in SEO is indeed the root of all evil. So, learn ways how to get high-quality backlinks.

9. Irrelevant Landing Pages

If you fail to optimize your landing pages, you will start having multiple web pages describing the same product. Sometimes, you land a customer on the wrong page. Ensure your website does not have irrelevant pages to confuse your readers and search engines.

10. Poor Images

When your images are of low quality, your website will end up with a higher bounce rate. Higher bounce rates is not good for the overall health of your website. If you want to know how to optimize a website, use high-quality images and learn image optimization for SEO as well.

Conclusion

If you consider various organic SEO strategies it is bound to help you avoid all sorts of over-optimization penalties. Resultantly, you can have ample improvement in your position in the SERPs. Organic SEO strategies comprise high-quality content, natural backlinks and last but not least an improved user experience. Write blogs consistently and generate internal and external links, which improves authenticity, engagement and branding.

Always try to get backlinks from high authority websites to consider them only if you want to link out to others. It will prove beneficial as well as worthy without causing any harm to your site. Remain abreast of such things and also maintain SEO strategies in such a manner that no way your site faces an over-optimization penalty. It is mandatory to keep the websites right and in order with the required boost.

Contact us now to know more about it and how to avoid it. You can also call or email us.