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 Search engines are very difficult to
completely understand. There are no complete explanations
of how their ranking algorithms work. But the very fact
that the average person does not intuitively know how to
crack the search engine algorithms leads to all sorts of
questions; Usually variations of:
“How do I get my website to the top of the search
engine results pile?”
Now if you have been following my newsletter, you will
know that search engine optimization is not magic or
something equally difficult to understand. Instead, I
learnt it as a step-by-step process and that is how I have
always considered it. Nothing too fancy; in fact, I could
probably summarize it all in the following points:
* An understanding of how search engines “think” .
* Knowing what search engines “want” .
* Learning proven optimization techniques .
* Applying your knowledge time and time again
(experience).
Of course, SEO is not explained by those four sentences,
but what they do is that they give you a structure within
which you can learn and carry out SEO on your business
with exceptional results. In short:
Get it right, and do it better than your competition.
But what does this have to do with today's discussion?
Basically, when you have “followed” the SEO strategies
to the letter, and are still not seeing your website rank
anywhere near where it “should” be on a particular
keyword, then you have one of the following problems:
* Your website may have been sandboxed (specific only to
Google).
* Your website might be penalized or even removed from the
index by a search engine for going against a stated
guideline.
* A search engine might “think” that you are spamming
them.
In the first case, you will have to “wait it out” with
Google, while consolidating on your positions in the other
search engines by continuously building links and adding
content. The second case will never happen if you follow
the advice given in my lessons; if your website is
penalized, compare what you have done with what I have
told you, and you will probably find out that something
has gone wrong.
However, like I said in the beginning, search engines are
notoriously difficult to understand – and sometimes you
can do everything right and still not be ranked correctly.
Conspiracy theories apart, this is the part of the
equation that search engines do not always get right. SEO
experts usually term this as over-optimization , and like
many SEO issues this one has a lot of debate on it in SEO
forums about whether websites are actually penalized for
over-optimization or simply banned for spam.
What exactly is over-optimization?
Over-optimization happens when your website is considered
“too good” by Google – either in terms of a sudden
volume of backlinks, or because of heavy on-page
optimization. In other words, if Google considers that
your website optimization is beyond acceptable limits ,
your website will be red-flagged and automatically
restricted or penalized.
There is a fine line between over-optimization and
spamming, and it is on this line that Google can appear to
err. However, this is not a mistake by the search engine
– in fact, Google calculates rankings by considering
thousands and thousands of different factors – and a lot
of importance is attached to average “trends” within
the niche / keyword range that a website is optimizing
for.
The bottom line is that over-optimization is non-spamming
search engine optimization that is misread by Google as
being beyond acceptable limits, thus leading to a penalty
in search engine rankings.
What criteria does Google use?
To understand why Google can consider certain websites
over-optimized, it is important to factor in the criteria
that Google uses to rank websites.
When fully indexing a website, Google does not just look
at the optimization of the target website; it also
compares the website with all the other websites that
belong to the same niche / category / keyword range.
Through this comparison, Google can then figure out the
following:
* Is this website “way more” optimized than the
current top ranking websites?
* In the past, have over-optimized websites been
discovered as spam websites?
* What are the trends / acceptable limits for
well-optimized websites in this niche/keyword range?
Since Google is automated, it cannot do what we do –
look at the webpage and determine if the purpose is spam
or delivering truly useful information. Instead, the
search engine uses historical trends to predict what the
acceptable limits of over-optimization are, and how likely
over-optimized websites are to be found out as spam.
In other words, your website may be red flagged as being a
potential spamming website even though your only fault
might be that you were “perfect” in optimizing your
website while your competition was left far behind.
Google takes both on-page and off-page optimization into
account when checking for over-optimization / spam, and as
such it watches out for over-optimization in all ranking
factors – your backlinks and your tag optimization (meta
tags, title tags, header tags) being most important.
A lot of what I am talking about becomes invalid if one
tries any overt search engine spamming technique , such as
stuffing your pages with keywords, white on white text
(something I talked about in the first few lessons) or
backlink spamming (building too many backlinks with the
same anchor text in a short period of time.
But it is also possible that you have followed advice and
still have your website penalized for over-optimization.
The real question then is:
 How can you avoid such penalties?
Avoiding the trap of over-optimization
As I mentioned at the start of this lesson, search engine
optimization can be boiled down to two simple steps:
* Getting it right and…
* Doing it better than everyone else.
In the context of over-optimization and avoiding
unnecessary penalties, this rings especially true. If you
optimize your website within search engine guidelines and
according to proven optimization practices, you have it
right. While putting too little time on SEO is a serious
mistake, the search for perfection within SEO is a
time-wasting and fruitless effort. Too much focus on
getting the page structure “just right” can divert
attention away from the more mundane but equally more
important tasks – such as adding more content or
monetizing the website.
The next step is to eschew perfection and find out what
your competition has done. Suppose that you are optimizing
your website for the term “landscaping”. Which of the
following approaches would you realistically choose?
* Go full-throttle on your search engine optimization,
spending as much time as necessary to get maximum value
out of each word, link and page in your website, so that
you can get the highest ranking possible.
* Analyze the top 10 webpages for the term
“landscaping” and understand what optimization has
been performed on them (natural or artificial). Calculate
the number of backlinks, check for authority inbound links
– and once you have figured out what your competition is
doing, and do exactly the same – only a bit more .
The first approach might mean that you are guaranteed a
top position on the search engines, but has two problems
– you will waste a lot of time and resources in this
search for perfection and more importantly, your website
may be flagged for over-optimization. On the other hand,
the second approach does just enough to beat the
competition – without pushing you or your budget to the
limit.
Over-optimization is a phenomenon that is particularly
difficult to figure out – how does a SEO expert really
determine whether his new website is in the sandbox,
penalized for over-optimization or just doing badly in the
search engines? While trying to find out the real cause
for your poor rankings may satisfy curiosity, you would be
better served by following the “second approach”
above.
Search engine optimization is a long-term, low-intensity
process. You keep building links and adding content, so
that eventually your website not only escapes the infamous
sandbox but it also starts to rank really well on the
search engines. And as for over-optimization – as long
you follow search engine guidelines and don't go too far
above your competition, you will be fine.
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