Using Common sense SEO to avoid Over-Optimization Penalty

Google’s series of updates: Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Transition Rank Patent etc. have made a positive mark for quality and original content and also created a threat to online spammers.The popularity of any brand/company these days is not just dependent on physical survival but has to survive over the Internet. To be more precise, a company is said to be doing good if its website is ranked better in Google search. Due to this, there has been tremendous stress on companies to maintain the content in their sites so that they are ranked well in Google searches. Hence SEO (Search engine Optimization) came into picture allowing websites to place keywords, links strategically over their site so that its rank is improved. As like any other thing, even SEO has limits and when the limit is crossed, there is a possibility that Google blacklists such sites. Google has its own algorithms to identify such over-optimization techniques done by the websites and has ways to penalize such sites.

There have been many updates done by Google to its search engine to identify the over-optimized sites and penalize them. These Google Algorithm changes resulted in more stringent rules to be followed by websites so that they don’t fall under the Google scanner. While Google Panda is targeted at identifying sites low on content and reduces the rankings, Google Penguin is aimed at reducing web spam. Both these algorithms can adversely affect a site if the over-optimization is not taken care. Most of the things can be handled just by applying common sense. Let’s go through few tips to avoid any such over optimization penalties…

1)    Authentic Titles:

This is a very basic and easy to follow tip. Websites rather than concentrating on keywords should put more emphasis on the meaning and authenticity. This not only improves the readability for the site but also attracts many viewers for its authentic content.

2)    Manipulative Internal Links:

Many sites as part of SEO try to improvise the rankings by placing many internal links that point to different locations of the same site. One can have internal links but need to be controlled and multiple internal links for the same anchor needs to be avoided. It’s known that multiple links pointing to same anchor will be counted only once while calculating the rank and further can get caught by Google Panda or Google Penguin due to the over-optimization techniques.

3)    Penalty Likely Sources:

This is one of the tough things that a website has to take care so that it doesn’t get penalized. Back links from other sites/sources, which are likely to be blacklisted by Google algorithms. Once the source is blacklisted, there is a very good chance that the sites back linking to these blacklisted sites will also get penalized. It’s advisable for the websites to avoid such back links especially to so called private link networks. These private link networks boast of many links that can be used but one has to be aware that such links are prone to Google penalties.