Having overly optimized web pages could soon get your websites in some
hot water with Google and their search results. It has recently been
announced that Google will start to penalize websites that engage in
over-optimization practices.
In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be covering some changes that
you should be making to your SEO practices in order to avoid this type
of penalization.
Video Transcription
Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another addition of Whiteboard Friday.
This week we've been hearing a lot of chatter in the SEO blogosphere and
on Twitter and on the forums about this new potential Google penalty
that's coming down the line around over-optimization. Now, one of
Google's representatives mentioned at a conference, South by Southwest,
down in Austin, Texas, about a month ago actually, that Google would be
looking into penalizing over-optimized websites and folks who have
engaged in over-
the-top SEO.
There's been a lot of speculation around when that's coming out,
whether that's coming out. There are a few things happening, actually,
this week and last night about, "Hey is this already something we're
seeing?" Seer Interactive, right, Wil Reynolds' fantastic SEO company
out of Philadelphia had this penalty, and people were wondering whether
that was related to this. Not really sure.
But before this penalty hits, for goodness sake, SEO folks, let's
make these changes to our websites because we could be in real trouble
if we don't impact these things beforehand. I think these are some of
the most likely candidates to be hit by Google's over-optimization
penalty, some of the most likely patterns they're going to try and match
against in this upcoming change. So let's talk through them.
Number one, your titles need to be authentic. They need to sound
real. They need to sound like a human being wrote them that was not
intending necessarily simply to rank for phrase after phrase. I'll give
you a good example. Bad: web design services, web design firm space
brand name, whatever your brand name is, web design. What does it sound
like? It sounds like all you're trying to do is rank for keywords, not
show off your brand name, especially if this is your home page or those
kinds of things. You're repeating keywords three times. Web design is in
this title three times. Think about whether a normal human being would
read that title and think, oh yeah, that sounds legitimate. No, they'd
think to themselves there's something fishy here, something spammy,
something's wrong, something manipulative. Try instead, probably equally
effective, if not more, brand name web design Portland Spiffiest Design
Services. Now look, I've got the word "design services," which you
wanted to get in here. I've got the city where you are that you're
trying to target, got brand name web design, right, sort of branding
myself as the product and the keyword. Much, much better.
Try and look through your sites and see if this is a potential issue.
I've seen tons of sites where SEO folks have just gone overboard again
and again. Don't get me wrong. I used to do this too. One of the
crappiest things about this is, even if your rank, your click through
rates go down. So you can rank in position two or three and be getting
less than the people below you, because people don't think that these
are legitimate titles and they perceive them to be manipulative,
especially if you're targeting more higher end, savvy or sophisticated
technology customers.
Number two, manipulative internal links. I see this a lot on side
bars, inside of content, where people have taken all of the instances of
a particular word or repeated it throughout the side bar or in the
footer, those kinds of things, and are pointing with exact match anchors
to the same page over and over again. Now, we all know as SEOs that the
first anchor text link counts and only one on the page is going to pass
that value. Linking repeatedly to the same page with the same anchor is
not helpful for SEO, and it makes our sites look really spammy and
manipulative and questionable to someone who's browsing it. Why would we
want to hurt our conversion rates like this, and why would we want to
point out to the engines that, hey, over here, I'm trying to manipulate
you? What are you thinking?
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