Breaking down Google's Over-Optimization Penalty
A few weeks ago, Matt Cutts from Google announced that Google was going to start cracking down on websites that were "over-optimized." In other words, Google is trying to clean up its SERPs (search results pages) to protect users against websites that try to trick the system.
It all boils down to SEO abuse
SEO abuse has become a serious problem. The reason that some website abuse SEO tactics is because there is a lot of web traffic up for grabs when you are ranking #1-3 for a particular keyword. If you're not on the first page of Google, you probably won't experience much traffic from the search engines. That's why there is a big push to get to the top.
In the process, however, some people start to abuse the SEO process. Instead of creating great products and content, they create lots and lots of spam. Google hates spam. The Panda Update was Google's initial push against spam. And now it seems that this over-optimization update is the next chapter in Google's war against spam.
What does over-optimization mean?
Thankfully, Google provided some guidelines to what "over-optimization" means.
Beware of the following practices:
Continue the following practices:
create unique and compelling content
focus on the user experience
optimize your website as if Google did not exist (more on this later)
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