SEO over-optimization | Beware of Google penalties

0 CommentsSunday • April 29, 2012 • by admin

Google Pandas, Penguins and other animals are getting updated more frequently than some people change underwear, owners of over-optimized websites should be aware of possible Google penalties and repair website’s structure before their SERP drops drastically. This is a post about over-optimized websites with example.

Over-optimized websites aren’t hard to find, it took me only 5 minutes exploring to find a perfect example. Some of the most important keywords for this website are “Supra”, “Buy Supra” and “Supra for sale”.

Keyword density:

Supra – 14.85%
Sale – 8.91%
Supras – 4.95%

Most of SEO experts believe optimal keyword density is 4% or less, top 3 keywords from example website are too high, especially “Supra” keyword, which has density of 14.85%.

Title tag: Supra for sale! Supra Cars | Buy and sell Supras at Supra Trader Online

Keyword “Supra” occurs 4 times (Supras included). Title tag is the most important SEO tag and a single keyword should occur more than twice.

Meta description tag: Supras for sale! Buy or sell your used Supra at Supra Trader Online Supra classified ads.

Meta description tag should have 150 characters or less (spaces included), because most of search engines don’t read more of them. This website has 89 characters in meta description tag and it only gives higher density for keyword “Supra”, which occurs 4 times. Density of keyword “Supra” in keywords tag is 25% which is absolutely too much.

Meta keywords tag: supras, sale, supra, supra classifieds, supra for sale, supras, supra, classifieds, ads, supras for sale

Meta keywords tag is irrelevant for rankings for Yahoo and Google, but they still read it and can detect spammy over-optimization. Duplicated words in meta keywords tag are not recommended to any website and don’t look natural at all.

Although website still holds top positions in Google for most important search terms, it is standing on a thin ice and future Google updates will most likely penalize it. Keyword diversity is becoming a crucial factor especially for micro niche websites, which have most of the content about a single keyword. Website’s optimization should be natural. Always ask yourself what would it be if people from Google manually review your website. Are your keywords standing out too much? There are a lot of free keyword diversity check tools, use them!