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Optimization, Over-Optimization or SEO Overkill?
The fight to top search engines' results knows no limits –
neither ethical, nor technical. There are often reports of
sites that have been temporarily or permanently excluded
from Google and the other search engines because of
malpractice and using “black hat” SEO optimization
techniques. The reaction of search engines is easy to
understand – with so many tricks and cheats that SEO experts
include in their arsenal, the relevancy of returned results
is seriously compromised to the point where search engines
start to deliver completely irrelevant and manipulated
search results. And even if search engines do not discover
your scams right away, your competitors might report you.
Keyword Density or Keyword Stuffing?
Sometimes SEO experts go too far in their desire to push
their clients' sites to top positions and resort to
questionable practices, like keyword stuffing. Keyword
stuffing is considered an unethical practice because what
you actually do is use the keyword in question throughout
the text suspiciously often. Having in mind that the
recommended keyword density is from 3 to 7%, anything above
this, say 10% density starts to look very much like keyword
stuffing and it is likely that will not get unnoticed by
search engines. A text with 10% keyword density can hardly
make sense, if read by a human. Some time ago Google
implemented the so called “Florida Update” and essentially
imposed a penalty for pages that are keyword-stuffed and
over-optimized in general.
Generally, keyword density in the title, the headings, and
the first paragraphs matters more. Needless to say that you
should be especially careful not to stuff these areas. Try
the Keyword Density Cloud tool to check if your keyword
density is in the acceptable limits, especially in the
above-mentioned places. If you have a high density
percentage for a frequently used keyword, then consider
replacing some of the occurrences of the keyword with
synonyms. Also, generally words that are in bold and/or
italic are considered important by search engines but if any
occurrence of the target keywords is in bold and italic,
this also looks unnatural and in the best case it will not
push your page up.
Doorway Pages and Hidden Text
Another common keyword scam is doorway pages. Before Google
introduced the PageRank algorithm, doorways were a common
practice and there were times when they were not considered
an illegal optimization. A doorway page is a page that is
made especially for the search engines and that has no
meaning for humans but is used to get high positions in
search engines and to trick users to come to the site.
Although keywords are still very important, today keywords
alone have less effect in determining the position of a site
in search results, so doorway pages do not get so much
traffic to a site but if you use them, don't ask why Google
punished you.
Very similar to doorway pages was a scam called hidden text.
This is text, which is invisible to humans (e.g. the text
color is the same as the page background) but is included in
the HTML source of the page, trying to fool search engines
that the particular page is keyword-rich. Needless to say,
both doorway pages and hidden text can hardly be qualified
as optimization techniques, there are more manipulation than
everything else.
Duplicate Content
It is a basic SEO rule that content is king. But not
duplicate content. In terms of Google, duplicate content
means text that is the same as the text on a different page
on the SAME site (or on a sister-site, or on a site that is
heavily linked to the site in question and it can be
presumed that the two sites are related) – i.e. when you
copy and paste the same paragraphs from one page on your
site to another, then you might expect to see your site's
rank drop. Most SEO experts believe that syndicated content
is not treated as duplicate content and there are many
examples of this. If syndicated content were duplicate
content, that the sites of news agencies would have been the
first to drop out of search results. Still, it does not hurt
to check from time if your site has duplicate content with
another, at least because somebody might be illegally
copying your content and you do not know. The Similar Page
Checker tool will help you see if you have grounds to worry
about duplicate content.
Links Spam
Links are another major SEO tool and like the other SEO
tools it can be used or misused. While backlinks are
certainly important (for Yahoo backlinks are important as
quantity, while for Google it is more important what sites
backlinks come from), getting tons of backlinks from a link
farm or a blacklisted site is begging to be penalized. Also,
if outbound links (links from your site to other sites)
considerably outnumber your inbound links (links from other
sites to your site), then you have put too much effort in
creating useless links because this will not improve your
ranking. You can use the Domain Stats Tool to see the number
of backlinks (inbound links) to your site and the Site Link
Analyzer to see how many outbound links you have.
Using keywords in links (the anchor text), domain names,
folder and file names does boost your search engine rankings
but again, the precise measure is the boundary between
topping the search results and being kicked out of them. For
instance, if you are optimizing for the keyword “cat”, which
is a frequently chosen keyword and as with all popular
keywords and phrases, competition is fierce, you might not
see other alternative for reaching the top but getting a
domain name like http://www.cat-cats-kittens-kitty.com,
which no doubt is packed with keywords to the maximum but is
first – difficult to remember, and second – if the contents
does not correspond to the plenitude of cats in the domain
name, you will never top the search results.
Although file and folder names are less important than
domain names, now and then (but definitely not all the time)
you can include “cat” (and synonyms) in them and in the
anchor text of the links. This counts well, provided that
anchors are not artificially stuffed (for instance if you
use “cat_cats_kitten” as anchor for internal site links this
anchor certainly is stuffed). While you have no control over
third sides that link to you and use anchors that you don't
like, it is up to you to perform periodic checks what
anchors do other sites use to link to you. A handy tool for
this task is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis, where you
enter the URL and get a listing of the sites that link to
you and the anchor text they use.
Finally, to Google and the other search engines it makes no
difference if a site is intentionally over-optimized to
cheat them or over-optimization is the result of good
intentions, so no matter what your motives are, always try
to keep to reasonable practices and remember that do not
overstep the line.
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