Avoid Google Penalty – Don’t Over Optimize Your Blog

Avoid Google Penalty – Don’t Over Optimize Your Blog

After the shocking closure of BMR, a private blog network, Google is ready to hammer the next nail on a blogger’s coffin with the announcement of penalizing over optimized blog. In mid-March, 2012, Google’s devil in disguise (*wink*), Matt Cutts, announces:

“We try to make the Google Bot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t do SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

 

 

Are you Over Optimizing?

Since Google does not clearly define what ‘ideal’ SEO consists of, new and experienced bloggers are left to their own devices to judge from current trends, reports and personal experiences.

However, all is not lost. It’s time to do a blog recon if you seriously want to avoid Google penalties.  Here are some of the things to watch out for:

1) Remove Doorway Pages

The use of hidden texts with high ranking keywords for search engine ranking is known as ‘doorway pages’. If you are hiring any SEO firms, ask them whether they use doorway pages. If they do, remove them immediately. Either the blog will be highly penalized or completely de-indexed.

2) Spam Blog Links

There is no love lost between bloggers and backlinks. While you want to see the backlink count increasing, take a look at the backlink source. Never link to spam websites and directories.

3) Optimize Sites for Humans, not Bots

Does your blog contain keywords as navigational links? Do you have a list of linked keywords in footer just for search engine bots to scan them? It is a huge mistake on your part. A blog should be optimized for human readers, not bots. Change the navigational structure of blog/s now.

4) Avoid Keyword Density

Unlike the niche and general blogs that were built 5-6 years back whose focus is entirely on keyword density, it has turned into a redundant factor. There is no point in following a prescribed density of keywords.

Instead, follow natural keyword density building where you don’t have to hark back at a list of keywords, usually Google AdWords keyword research tool, to write on. Rather than concentrating on keyword inclusions, take note of keyword proximity, occurrence and distribution.

5) Avoid Regurgitated Content

Have you ever noticed how a cow ‘regurgitates’ its food after hours of swallowing it? Most newbie bloggers who do not have writing skills tend to do this. Unless you are running a news blog, you cannot risk putting up regurgitated or rewritten content on the blog/s. Such content is classified as bad or low quality pieces, something which every other blog is writing about, so how does it give your blog uniqueness.

Granted, there are some things which every blog experiences and writes about; however, try to express them in your own way rather than regurgitating it. Give it your twist, your ‘thought’.

6) Anchor Text Linking

Supposedly, you want to rank high for ‘best laptops of 2012’ so you think that every backlink should be linked with this anchor text. Right? Wrong! Best or natural SEO backlink building happens when the link leads back to a complete informative piece or an article.

Summary

If Google follows through its mission to penalize over optimize blogs and you don’t take it seriously, the search engine rankings are going to be hit hard and lead to blog de-indexing. Prevent this situation by following the tips above.

Please share with us your tip for over blog optimization prevention.

Author Bio

Chitraparna also writes for WebhostingPad.com and Register.com and she encourages you to check out webhostingpad coupon codes and register.com promo codes if you are interested in discounted web hosting deals. You can add her on Twitter @chitraparna.