Is There Anything As An Over-Optimization Penalty?
September 13th, 2005 by YzabelA post by Bill Hartzer on Search Engine Guide caught my attention recently. It’s titled Does an Over-Optimization Penalty Exist?, and asks a few interesting questions about this “problem” (I’m putting the word between quotes, as by reading the source article, it looks like not everyone risks encoutering such a penalty in their own SEO). Her’s an example of what over-optimization includes:
You decide that your site is not ranking well. So, you change the navigation on your site so that all the home page links say “keyword keyword home” instead of “home”. A few days later you lose your rankings, which is a serious blow to your traffic. Since that was the only thing you changed on your site you change those links to your home page back so it says, “home” instead of “keyword keyword home”. BINGO! All of your lost rankings and your lost traffic comes back a few days later.
If that’s not proof of an over-optimization penalty then I don’t know what is–I would call that an OOP: you do something to try to boost your rankings by over optimizing some element of your website, something that backfires and causes a loss of rankings.
I don’t think I’ve ever have to deal with this myself as of yet, but it’s after all only been a few weeks that I’m seriously researching and using SEO tactics, and I also know I haven’t finishing learning. I very likely rank among the “white hats” described by Hartzer—people who haven’t tested SEO limits to —so this probably normal.
In any case, over-optimization must not be mixed with spamming. Spamming will get a site banned from search engines; over-optimizing won’t.
