Google’s head spam cop Matt Cutts announced the
impending launch of a new over-optimization penalty to “level the playing
ground.” The disclosure came earlier this month at the South By Southwest
(SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas during an open panel — entitled “Dear Google
& Bing: Help Me Rank Better!” — with Google’s and Bing’s webmaster and web
spam representatives. Google’s goal for the penalty is to give sites that have
produced great content a better chance to rank and drive organic search traffic
and conversions.
Pretty much all site owners can point to the search results
for their dearest trophy phrase and point out at least one site that just
shouldn’t be allowed to rank. Competitive ire aside, sometimes sites have poor
content but focus extra hard on their search engine optimization efforts. These
sites are easy to spot. They usually have a keyword domain, lots of
keyword-rich internal linking, and heavily optimized title tags and body
content. Their link portfolios will be heavily optimized as well. But their content
is weak, their value proposition is low, they’re obviously — to human observers
— only ranking because of their SEO. The upcoming over-optimization penalty
would theoretically change the playing field so that sites with great content
and higher user value rank above sites with excessive SEO.
What Qualifies as Over-Optimization?
No one but Google knows what, exactly, is
"over-optimization." However, Cutts did mention that Google is
looking at sites by “people who sort of abuse it whether they throw too many
keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever
they're doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a
particular area.” It’s widely believed that keyword stuffing and link exchanges
are already spam signals in Google’s algorithm, so either Google intends to
ratchet up the amount of penalty or dampening that those spam signals merit
algorithmically or they have new over-optimization signals in mind as well.
5 Signals that Should Qualify as Over-Optimization
Because I can’t believe that the bits Cutts references are
all there is to the over-optimization algorithm update, I’ve been daydreaming
about what I would classify as over-optimization. Keep in mind that I have no
inside knowledge as to what they’re planning. In other words, don’t run out and
change all these things just because you read this article. But these tactics
are on my list because they leave a bad taste in my mouth when I come across
them and I sure hope they’re on Cutts’ list as well.
- Linking to a page from that same page with optimized anchor text. If the page is www.jillsfakesite.com/flannel-shirts, and in the body copy of that page I link the words “flannel shirts” to the same page the words are on, IE www.jillsfakesite.com/flannel-shirts, that should count as over-optimization.
- Linking repeatedly from body copy to a handful of key pages with optimized anchor text. If 33 of my 100 pages link to www.jillsfakesite.com from the body copy with the anchor text “Jills Fake Site,” that should count as over-optimization.
- Changing the “Home” anchor text to your most valuable keyword.Usually the home link is the site’s logo. But in the cases where the home link is textual and has been optimized with the juiciest keyword, that should count as over-optimization.
- Overly consistent and highly optimized anchor text on backlinks. If 10 of the 100 links to a page contain the same highly optimized anchor text, such as “Jill’s Fake Site, the Fakest Site Selling Flannel Shirts on the Web,” that should count as over-optimization.
- Generic keyword domain name. They have way too much impact on rankings, and need to be demoted in importance. Now I’m sure it’s difficult to determine which words are generic and which are brands. But Google seems to have cracked that nut at least partially with its related brands results. Surely they must be close to understanding the difference between the non-branded domain littleblackdress.com and the brand whitehouseblackmarket.com.
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