About a month ago Google dropped a hint that they will be looking into penalising websites that are over optimised. Lots of people have speculated what this means and when it could happen. We have kept quiet on the subject until we had seen some movement on this. Although we haven’t seen anything negative movement for our clients websites there is a lot of talk about other sites out there which might have been affected.
So what to do and what’s it all about? Well Google have been drumming into us for quite a while that they want quality content which is for the reader, and not for Google’s robot to find keywords on the page. We think they will be continuing on this theme. Make changes to the following areas of your site by making them for the reader:
Title tag: One of the biggest signals (at the moment) for the search engines is the Title tag, we recommend not to stuff your title with keywords. This is the most important line for your site in the search results, therefore use it cleverly and sell your service or product.
Keyword Stuffing: If you have some content on your site purely to get your keywords on to the page, we recommend removing it before this update happens. Replace it with useful content which readers will want to read, if you write the content well you might be able to include one or two of the keywords you removed. But write it for the reader, not Google’s robot.
Internal Linking: Many people still think having every one of your keywords written on a page should link out to the relevant page. To Google this looks like you have purposely added these links into the content to send link value to the internal page, this doesn’t fool Google. The most important internal link for the keyword is the first one, therefore don’t do anymore than one. We are not saying don’t have internal links, in fact the opposite as they are very important. But you really only need one internal link per keyword on a page, if you are using a plugin that automatically creates links from your keywords we recommend removing it.
Apr 25, 2012 – Update
As if by magic a few hours after we posted the above blog Google had announced that they will be changing their algorithm within the next 3 days. Google’s full statement is here.
Here is a quote:
In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at web-spam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.
If you require assistance with your website get in touch!
We hope this help, if you have anything to add or any questions just ask and we will try our best to answer.