Having been in the online marketing industry for a few years now, I’ve often come across people and businesses that are convinced that they can do better SEO optimization than professional SEO specialists, free of charge. One mistake that these business owners and admittedly, some (not-so-professional) professional SEO companies often make, is that of over-optimizing their sites. Let’s take a closer look…

Overdoing your keyword optimization:

The very first thing everyone learns in SEO is the implementation of keyword optimization for pages and websites as a whole. Newcomers to the search engine optimization (SEO) game will learn that having the correct keywords on a page will tell search engines that the article is relevant to a particular subject that users have searched for. So the first thing they do is completely saturate their pages with relevant keywords. The problem is however, that Google and other search engines are not stupid. They can EASILY detect someone who is overdoing their SEO optimization with keyword stuffing and quickly penalize the page with low rankings and a damaged reputation.

Many people believe that their results drop in rankings because Google has penalised them, others believe that these penalties don`t exist and that a drop in rankings can be attributed to Google`s re-indexing. Both sides have valid points, as well as some arguable flaws in their arguments, however, it`s better to be safe than sorry so let`s just consider the possibility of Google penalties.

There have been reports of occasions where results have dropped drastically in a short space of time. Where once searches stood proudly on the first page, they can now only be found cowering in 31st place or lower, even a search for the domain name only produces results that appear at the top of the 4th page. Spooky I know, and it affects all the pages throughout the domain. This is what they refer to as the “-30” penalty, as sites tend to drop an average of 30 positions. Whether the reason for the drop was because of a penalty or a re-index, there is obviously something that Google doesn`t agree with on your site. If by any chance you are an optimist, the good news is this is seen as a relatively light penalty from Google, and can be overcome relatively quickly and easily by making the appropriate changes to the site and then re-submitting it to Google.