A peek into the past will show how it impacts reality today. Nowadays, almost every website uses SEO or Search Engine Optimization to attract more viewers to their webpages. Optimization means adding relevant content, keywords, and links to the website to increase its exploration rate and make it convenient for the users. Although these SEOs were meant to improve the quality of websites, companies have started exploiting this feature by surpassing SEO limits. So, Google came up with an idea to counter the exploiters. These measures are the present guidelines to be followed by every Google site.
While SEO is very beneficial and increases the quality of web pages, excessive use of SEO (or SEO Over Optimization) and irrelevant use of keywords to lure surfers to the page affects quality. The news spread that Google was working on a search ranking penalty for web pages with Over-Optimization. As a result, every website with SEO came under the scanner.
When did this happen?
This announcement came at a panel discussion at SXSW named, "Dear Google and Bing: Help me rank better." This was when the SEO professionals and their clients learned that Google was working on an algorithm tweak targeting websites qualifying for over-optimization. A penalty would be imposed upon those webpages, and the result would be either degrading the rank or excluding the site from the search engine. Matt Cutts mentioned that the new over-optimization penalty would become a part of search result parameters.
The purpose being "the leveling of the playing field," said Cutts. Given Google's unwavering loyalty to relevance, the aim is to provide websites with good content an opportunity to rank higher than those with mediocre content but incredible Search Engine Optimization.
Our understanding of a part of Matt's speech is here:
The main aim here is to level the playing field. The reason being there are many sites with good content and poor SEOs. In contrast, others with the least helpful content have good, or rather over-optimized, SEOs as a balancing act. So, there are websites with creative and quality content against those with unremarkable content and SEO over-optimization. The goal is to make GoogleBot smarter, increase relevance, and find the sites exploiting the usage of SEOs. Overuse usually involves adding more than the required number of keywords, adding irrelevant and extensive word count links, not providing useful content and deviating from the main topic, or going beyond what is expected of a good SEO.
How will Google find these pages with over-optimization and differentiate between the good SEO pages and the bad SEO pages?
GoogleBot uses a crawler that scans the sites' index and compares the content searched with the website content. This will show the most relevant data. In the vast heap of such indices, it is quite a tough job to bring back the basics of on-page SEO and the importance of inbound link relevance. Google is also prioritizing high-quality content and creative layout, but zero SEO with surprisingly high Public Relations(PR) and SERP(Search Engine Results Pages) ranks. Google aims to scan through the sites and frame them under good or bad SEO pages.
This Algorithm layout by Google favors a superior but less-noticeable webpage over lousy web pages with over SEO. Google helps the excellent web pages to rank higher and degrades the ranking of over-optimized web pages.
Is there any solution to the over-optimization penalty?
Abiding by the SEO guidelines can easily cast a good SEO page. The secret lies in planning and structuring your on-page SEO, right from the beginning of content management. Choosing the relevant keywords carefully and creating good content according to the web page's main heading is necessary.
While many people know about including apt keywords and acknowledging content, many ignore the importance of appropriate inbound links. To have a high grade in SERP ranking, you must be sure that the links within the page are of high ranking as well. A web page is ranked higher when the content and sources being provided are also of high quality.
Another measure that is often disregarded is the presence of only one main heading. A good SEO on-page provides only one main title, while others may or may not be equal to each other.
No business can afford to ignore the importance of being found on the search engines, given that the market competition is rising at a remarkable speed. The earlier you start strategizing the SEO of your page, the better outcomes for your business.
Getting started with on-page SEO requires you to follow SEO content writing and update metadata and the websites while staying true to the SEO guidelines.
i like to write and having spent so many yers in the industry, its all i write about. i occassionally write poetry, but thats turned into a rather rare phenomenon now.