Over-Optimization – SEO Overkill

SEO is the butter on the bread of all online businesses. But if a too thick layer of butter would make your liver sick, too much SEO can kill your business ranking.

It is a common fact that content is the heart of all the sites. Still the term of overstuffing content with keywords is directly linked to over optimization. The regular number of keywords is directly reported to the word count of the content and you must be aware that the limit is no more than 7%. Anything above this will surely trigger the famous “Florida update” and Goggle will tag and ban the site so fast that the owner will be shocked how fast the site disappeared from the search.

Doorway pages are something very common for creating links. They were the first kind of link farms and basically became a true example of SEO overkill. Before Google algorithm was created these doorway pages were spread all over the web with the single purpose of driving visitors to a site. The content in them was stuffed with keywords but made no sense for anybody who read it. Once the algorithm became the main tool used to determine page rank, keywords were no longer the main criteria for page rank so the doorway pages did a lot of damage to an impressive number of sites.

Content remains the best SEO tool. Still it is the most precious asset of the site only when it is original. Duplicated content is something that spikes high in the attention of web crawlers. Most webmasters believe that spun and rewritten content does not catch the eye of the search engines. However the Google, Yahoo and Bing trinity have come up with a new way of tracking sources, comparing the number or words, and calculating the eventuality of a replica. No matter how much you try optimization on such a text, it will not generate you the traffic you need.

A very good SEO overkill example is a link farm. Backlinks are indeed important both for traffic and for SERP. Still a huge number of links repeatedly submitted to a directory, following a pattern and appearing virtually everywhere will not have the effect you expect. Too many links will get you nowhere and the huge effort will only make your site go down from the search because Google reads into it nothing but link spam.