Over optimization penalty

Hi all,

Quick answer needed. Is there such a thing as an "over optimization penalty". We're getting this from an SEO who we think might be pulling the wool over our eyes.

Look forward to your responses

Thanks

Sharka

of course there is...once you do too much then google will penalise you as you're essentially doing things at that point for the googlebot and not for standard visitors in an attempt to manipulate your search rankings.

Things that might produce a penalty are things like keyword stuffing, link exchanges with bad neighbourhoods, dodgy practices like hidden test or doorway pages...stuff like that.

Well I've personally never had an 'over-optimisation penalty', but I've certainly heard of it. I've heard the rumours of getting too many links with the same anchor/link text, too many of the same keywords on the page and so forth.

He's probably trying to cut his work-load to be honest, tell him to pull his finger out!

I would disagree with the link comment although your keyword stuffing comment is spot on.

All that would happen in this occasion if Google thought that you were doing dodgy link building is that it would disregard those links, so it's not penalising you as such, all it's doing is returning your rank to where it would have been if you'd not had those links in the first place....Same with bought links that google recognises although it's wise to vary your anchor text to avoid this happening to get the most out of your incoming links

No incoming link can hurt your site, only be totally worthless, only outgoing links can have a direct effect on your rankings as they're the only ones that you as a webmaster have control of

By definition it is impossible to "over optimize" a site is either optimized or it is not.

As to a penalty for "poorly optimized" mostly that would be either

a) The poor optimization means the site is ranking poorly.
b) Links to the site have been devalued because Google has identified them as non editorial links.
c) A site benefitted from the 'new site boost effect' which has now worn off and the site has fallen to where it will sit until moved by links.
d) The algo has been tweaked and something that worked before no longer works.

e) You have been penalized by Google for breaking their Terms of Service. (If this is the case then you will need to know exactly what caused the violation of the TOS)

Thus what you should be asking is what exactly the SEO firm has done to your site. It is certainly not over optimization as that is impossible…..

The over optimization theory came out of some discussions about google being capable of noting trends. So if you optimize all your keywords to within 4% density on every page x 10000 google will notice. Is there a penalty? I would really doubt that. Everything is, after all, about links (and content) [or may be it's content, (and links)].

DEFINITION OF OVER OPTIMIZATION PENALTY:

"For the life of me I can't fathom why I'm not ranking anymore... it must be because of something. I guess it's that over-optimization penalty that has no specific details... it's just a collection of whatever so I can sleep at night knowing I figure it out".

I was just answering his question, yes there is such a thing as an overoptimisation penalty

Here's a link discussing it, linking to a video where Matt Cutts discusses it briefly saying don't optimise quite as much and where as I don't always agree with what Matt says as I think he does a great job of selling what google is saying, not always the truth, but on this occasion, I have no reason to disagree with him

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013473.html

All I was doing was pointing out some of the dodgy techniques that might lead to this, I didn't say it had been applied to the OPs site or that the OPs SEO was correct or incorrect, without actually analysing the OPs site, I honestly couldn't comment

There is no such thing as an over optimization penalty. You get in trouble for excessive (insert seo element here) spammy seo work though.

Cutts says no OOP: http://searchengineland.com/googles...imization-21471

which could be described as "over optimisation"

we're talking semantics at this point

Excessive = Over
SEO element = Optimisation

So same thing as far as I'm concerned...and I believe too much spammy SEO work was how I described it in my first post when I talked about keyword stuffing, hidden text, linking to bad neighbourhoods etc..

Fair enough Saigon2010, good point! However, lets try to be accurate here. Nobody would describe someone's prison sentence as being an over breaking the law penalty. He's there for a specific reason and when he gets out, hopefully he knows not to do that again.

When we tell someone who is guilty of keyword stuffing that they have an over optimization penalty, that doesn't really tell them much does it?

Fair enough, I take your point. As I said, I wouldn't be able to tell quite why the OPs site was penalised...if it had been penalised at all without actually looking at it

I believe over optimisation penalty exists only if you don't have a clue about onpage seo and it can be only applied for onpage seo mistakes like (keyword stuffin, giving one thing to the search engine bot and another to the user, ....

Offpage over optimisation probably don't exist except in one case. You can't control who, when and how links to you. If you can't control you are not responsible. In worst case Google and other search engine will not give any significance to bad or wrong links...

However there is one case I can think of where over optimization penalty probably exists. If we have for example young site, for example few months, and if have all backlinks with same anchor that means that we artifically built those backlinks and since those are not natural and you want to influence ranking, search engine will give you penalty, or maybe just devalue all you single anchor backlinks (until site manage to get backlinks from different authority sources) and your site will drop and people will think its penalty.

And we would correctly refer to that as a link spam filter. Not an OOP

If you have excessive duplicated content... you don't get an overoptimisation penalty... additional pages get excluded

If you have excessive hidden text... you don't get an overoptimisation penalty... you get filter specifically for hidden text.

If you have excessive hidden links... you don't get an overoptimisation penalty... you get filter by the links.

If you have excessive traded links (paid links or footer links)... you don't get an overoptimisation penalty... you get filter because of link manipulation.

In all of these instances there is a "SPECIFIC" violation... that Google takes action against... what specific about overoptimisation?

How do you identity it?

This is the same kind of bull**** the keyword density was built on... "all factors conbined to come up with a new factor that is total bull****".

Yes you can get in trouble by using some "excessive"... but you can't get in trouble by excessive these:

alt tags
titles
text
bold
italic
headers

So your overoptimisation penalty is very selective to specific conditions... and the only reason anyone claims overoptimisation penalty "they don't understand".