SEO is all about walking a tightrope of doing just enough but not overdoing the optimization of your site. The latter part of that statement is punishable by the Google over optimization penalty.

Google Over Optimization Penalty

It got to this point because initially rudimentary search engines needed people to blatantly use tags to identify what their content was so that the search engines could organize it accordingly. Like with everything else in life, eventually enough people found a way to exploit the variety of factors which search engines used to rank a web page. Enter the Google over optimization penalty.

The reasoning for this penalty is straight forward and understandable. Google doesn’t want to reward a website whose sole purpose appears to be satisfying Google before their users. Example, a webmaster goes “my content is crap BUT I’ve still got tons and tons of links to my site… don’t ask me how I got them”.

This looks and feels fishy, and Google considers links as one of their Google ranking factors, so they don’t like giving out high and visible rankings to crappy sites and only finding out after the fact that they did this, so they’ve tightened up on over optimization.

Google Penalty Checker

Here is my Google Penalty Checker Checklist – a list of things which can get you in trouble in terms of over optimization.

• Don’t use the exact same anchor text when creating links back to a page, vary it up a bit with variations and LSI keywords.
• If you are creating lots of links to your site from the same IP address, this tells Google that it’s one computer which is spamming, AKA this does not look natural.
• If your website uses one or multiple black hat SEO techniques to boost rankings, Google can catch on to it and punish your site. This includes cloaking, doorway pages, buying links, using spammy link building tools, keyword stuffing, and other unnatural link building techniques.
• Building links too quickly or out of character for your site, meaning you average 5-10 new links to your site each day, then out of nowhere you pick up hundreds or thousands of links the next day.
• Anything which doesn’t look natural in terms of SEO. No matter what you’re doing when involving SEO with your site, make it (or make it look) as natural possible.

Again, remember that the user comes first in your mind and the search engine second, do this and you’ll remain unpenalized and will enjoy rewarding rankings in time.