Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
first of all this is not a rant or any similar 'my competitor does this' kinda post, it's facts based, so can we try to keep it that way.
There's been a lot of post written about the fear of over-optimisation penalty, but I want to put everybody's mind at rest - THERE IS NO OVER OPTIMISATION PENALTY.
Common fear of Over-Opt. often appear when you want to do something with your site that you wouldn't necesseraly be able to justify if you were to follow one or the other guidelines given by the W3C: use of keywords in comments, use of multiple wordy and linked h1's, multiple keywords in img alt attributes, etc.
Let's try to weed out some of your fears.
The site used in this example ranks no1 on G for a lot of very competitive keywords (20/30+ Mil). It's also in the top 10 on all three major player in the SE market (organic listing), so maybe we can learn from them. The site 'tested' always returned the same page in for the tried keyword so the examples below apply to this page.
As always, discussions about what other people do is very difficult. It can sound like a rant or a complaint. This will not help.
It can also sound like finger pointing - 'he' doesn't follow the W3C guidelines, I do and I am nowhere near the no1 spot. This will not help either.
I am not condamning this company, they do offer the services that they rank well for. They are also prepared to take some 'risks' that I am not (if there is no over-optimisation penalty - are these really risky method?).
So what are my options? I can take it upon myself to try to find alternative keywords, or I can be prepared to take those 'risks' as well. I choose the former.
Anyway, I hope that those of you who were thinking of optimising your site but feared the over-optimisation penalty will have had found the peace of mind to do so, thanks to this post. I wish you good luck here.
Leo
[disclaimer]these are facts noticed on a unique site that is doing well, if you try and do the same on yours and get banned - don't come and blame me ;)[/disclaimer]
I also want to add that it's not worth stickying me to get the site URL - I won't give it to you :)
However, I don't remember any of those things being involved in OOP.
I think there are so many factors that go into a site ranking, that it is silly to think one of them will completely impact a site. Perhaps the site in question was de-valued for optimization, but has so many more relevant backlink than their competition that it didn't matter.
I don't remember any of those things being involved in OOP
ciml - how would you define OOP then?
If you cast your mind back to the Florida update, people described dramatic falls in the rankings of pages. Generally home pages, the main connection between them were that they had many links to them with identical anchor text. According to my recollection, this is where the term Overoptimisation Penalty (or Over Optimisation Penalty or OOP) started.
Following that time, many people took the words more literally and applied them to pages with high keyword density, long titles or just where the various aspects of the page were 'aligned' around the same keyphrase. Yet, I do not remember the pattern of ranking changes at the time having anything to do with those things.
Hence, I agree with the ideas that you argue against in your post today, but I don't think you're arguing against OOP in terms of the meaning as I understand it.
I'm intrigued by G displayed the meta description in the SERP for all the searches done. Was the search phrase actually on the top ranking page? If it was, could this give weight to the possibility that the phrase was ignored because of how it appeared on the page?
More info please.
Many things in the webmaster busines is just pure rumor or speculations.
Gurantee you if you place every word on your page inside seperate H1 tags it won't do as well.
Ditto if you repeat a word 500 times on a page, don't expect to rank for the word.
There is an oop penalty for sure
In the following thread there were some good observations from both sides of the camp and there didn't seem to be a clear consensus.
You De-optimized Your Website
Are You Happy Now?
[webmasterworld.com...]
And the one which is an authority site probabaly on a few thousand things, with thousands of employees, and massive optimization by all those employees?
If the site is what I have in mind, yes, they have rather strange ways of optimization - often going overboard - but the age of the site, massive natural backlinks and large number of pages mean any penalty is balanced out by other factors.
I tend to lean towards the OOP camp for no other reason than it is a logical and simple thing for Google to do. It also looks like that what is happening to a couple of my sites. Bear with me while I give you my tuppence worth on this.
Let's have a look at it from Google's perspective. They know that people (us) try to manipulate their results. They also know that we are aware of many of the main factors that are used by the algorithm to increase SERPs position, they even tell us about them. They know that we will use them on our websites so how would they combat this?
If it were me I would look for competitive or even common KWs in meta content, page titles, descriptions, H1 tags, bolded text, anchor text, etc. etc. If I saw these words there I think I could safely say that they did not appear in all of these places naturally and that KWs were being targeted. I would not penalise the site for this. I would merely disregard any weighting factor for these KWs on this site. Wouldn't this be an effective way of combating spammers? This is one of Google's declared missions.
It is very unlikely that KWs would appear naturally in all of these places. Let's say that we don't know about SEO. We trade on the name "J. Blooggs" and we sell "enamel dobbers". Would we buy the domain name enamel-dobbers.com? I doubt it, we would be much more likely to go for jblooggs.com. We could title the home page "Enamel Dobbers direct to you from Joe Blooggs". In the page description we say something along the lines of, "We provide all kinds of Enamel Dobbers Worldwide". The page header (H1) may also be something like, "Enamel Dobbers from J. Blooggs". We may have anchor text somewhere on the page that links to internal pages with different ranges of enamel dobbers but apart from a few references in the page text content that would be about it. Google comes along and thinks ... hmmmm ... this site must have something to do with enamel dobbers so I'll rank it accordingly.
OTOH if we were specifically targeting the KWs "enamel dobbers" we would have all of the above. We could have the domain name enamel-dobbers.com. We may also have lots of anchor text that uses the KWs. We would have an unnaturally high KW density in the text. We would have it bolded, linked, H1'd, H2'd, H3'd. It would be at the start of every paragraph, every header, every description, etc. etc. Google comes along and thinks ... hmmm ... this site is definitely about enamel dobbers but the webmaster has SEO'd it to death. I think I'll just disregard it for these KWs, he/she is probably trying to spam me.
We all know that the Algo is clever enough to (mostly) rank things fairly accurately. It does this by looking at all of the factors mentioned above so wouldn't it be a simple progression to analyse these and apply an OOP where required?
There will be other over riding factors such as when the site is a "major player" with PR7, long established, etc. This is probably why the site in your example gets away with it. There is also a magic recipe for the use of these factors that lets some sites rank highly. The ingredients will be a combination of these factors with some of them omitted but I don't know which, (I just wish that I did!)
( ... now quickly ducks behind the barricade.)
but has so many more relevant backlink than their competition that it didn't matter.
I am not so sure, although I said that their PR was high the 'followers' all have PR5/6. They seem to have 4000+ backlinks in G but how accurate can this number be? On Y! it says 150K+!
ciml
Following that time, many people took the words more literally and applied them to pages with high keyword density, long titles or just where the various aspects of the page were 'aligned' around the same keyphrase
MHes
I'm intrigued by G displayed the meta description in the SERP for all the searches done. Was the search phrase actually on the top ranking page? If it was, could this give weight to the possibility that the phrase was ignored because of how it appeared on the page?
BillyS
Bad logic. I'm not say this is right or wrong, simply the conclusion is flawed.
nippi
total crap.
Gurantee you if you place every word on your page inside seperate H1 tags it won't do as well.
Ditto if you repeat a word 500 times on a page, don't expect to rank for the word.
martinibuster
Google's algo is a moving target and things change all the time but the importance of the link strategy seemed to remain a constant throughout most of the changes. Which led me to feel some doubt about the OOP.
Rollo
Over-optimization is a slippery term. Where does over-optimization end and mild spamming begin? I think no one would be surprised if one were to incur a penalty for mild-spamming.
Elixir
Without seeing the URL its impossible to get into this disucssion.
wanderingmind
isnt this site the huge site that was recently acquired by a huge print publishing company?
And the one which is an authority site probabaly on a few thousand things, with thousands of employees, and massive optimization by all those employees?
but the age of the site, massive natural backlinks and large number of pages mean any penalty is balanced out by other factors.
BeeDeeDublleU
There will be other over riding factors such as when the site is a "major player" with PR7, long established, etc. This is probably why the site in your example gets away with it.
on a sidenote: googled the domain owner and found one of her post(yes guys it's a lady - who said that the net was a man's man's world ;)) on a home working forum. She said that she just started the company and asked for advices - well I guess we're the one who need to ask her advices now.
Leo
Once again I think this comes down to Google's avowed determination to make war on spam. Their algo is already designed to analyse web page content for all the factors I mentioned in my previous post so I think it would be a relatively simple progression to use it to look for over optimisation.
If they did not do this they would be missing a major opportunity to clean up the results (IMHO).
BillySBad logic. I'm not say this is right or wrong, simply the conclusion is flawed.
Could you develop?
No, there is simply not enough information for you to draw this conclusion. To say there is no penalty because you have observed one site that does not appear to be penalized is flawed and misleading.
Besides, you lost a ton of credibility when you post this statement:
I also want to add that it's not worth stickying me to get the site URL - I won't give it to you :)
On another note, you make completely unclear statements such as:
text manipulation using CSS - this doesn't seem to have a negative impact on the site
Why would CSS, a W3 standard, cause penalties? If you are talking about making H1 smaller or in a different color so that it more user friendly, that is one thing. If you are talking about mouseprint or white on white, then you are COMPLETELY wrong.
To say there is no penalty because you have observed one site that does not appear to be penalized is flawed and misleading.
Besides, you lost a ton of credibility when you post this statement:I also want to add that it's not worth stickying me to get the site URL - I won't give it to you :)
Why would CSS, a W3 standard, cause penalties? If you are talking about making H1 smaller or in a different color so that it more user friendly, that is one thing.
If you are talking about mouseprint or white on white, then you are COMPLETELY wrong.
Leo
I agree that my observation is only based on one site but could you prove me wrong and provide me with facts that show the contrary?
With respect, it was you who started the thread, don't you think that it's you who should be providing the facts? You are the one who made the bold statement, "THERE IS NO OVER OPTIMISATION PENALTY".
It was a rhetorical question.
You are the one who made the bold statement, "THERE IS NO OVER OPTIMISATION PENALTY".
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, let me try again:
There is no over-optimisation penalty (let's call it OOP from now on shall we), THERE IS however a SPAM penalty
Let's take your example of Enamel Dobbers from J. Blooggs.
Let's say Mr Blooggs has a website and his homepage is coded along the lines of (please note that this is quite some clean code. It can - and will - be worse if J. Blooggs used word or powerpoint to design his/her pages:
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled-1</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="J. Blooggs, J. Blooggs.com, Enamel Dobbers">
<meta name="description" content="Welcome to J. Blooggs.com - supplying Enamel Dobbers">
<meta name="generator" content="mygenerator">
<meta name="copyrights" content="J. Blooggs">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="1day">
</head>
<body>
<table><tr><td><img src="logo.gif" width="250" height="100" align="left">Welcome to JBloogs website. J Bloogs is a company supplying Enamel Dobbers worldwide. To view our range of products, <a href="page1.htm">click here</a></td><tr></table>
</body>
</html>
now take le_gber inc. - part-time optimisation guy to optimise the page, you may end up with something like this (changes in blue for ease of reading):
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to J Bloogs.com supplying Enamel Dobbers worldwide</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="Enamel Dobbers, J. Blooggs, J. Blooggs.com">
<meta name="description" content="Welcome to J. Blooggs.com - supplying Enamel Dobbers">
remove unused meta
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="1day">
</head>
<body>
<table><tr><td><img src="logo.gif" width="250" height="100" align="left" alt="J Blooggs Logo"><h1>Welcome to JBloogs website.</h1> J Bloogs is a company supplying Enamel Dobbers worldwide. To view our range of Enamel Dobbers, <a href="page1.htm">click here</a></td><tr></table>
</body>
</html>
clearly not over optimised
take le_gber inc. - full-time optimisation company to optimise the page, you may end up with something like this (changes in blue for ease of reading):
<html>
<head>
<title>Enamel Dobbers and Enamel Dobber from J Bloogs</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="enamel dobbers, enamel dobber, dobber, dobbers, enamel, enamelled, enamelling">
<meta name="description" content="Enamel Dobbers and quality enamel dobber from J Bloogs enamel dobbers' supplier">
remove more unused meta
</head>
<body>
<div id="w"><img src="logo.gif" id="logo" alt="Enamel Dobbers and Enameled Dobber"><h1>Enamel Dobbers and Enamel Dobber from J Bloogs the Dobber Enameling Company</h1> <a href="enameled_dobbers_gifts.htm">Enamel Dobbers are a great gift</a> idea for you and your family. Why not visit our <a href="how_we_enamel_dobbers.htm">dobber enameling</a> page to learn more. Alternatively you can learn about our <a href="enamel_dobbers_fullrange.htm">full range of Enamel dobbers</a>, or our <a href="enameled_dobbers_worldwide.htm">worlwide enameled dobber distribution</a>
<div>
</body>
</html>
That's been optimised 'properly' BUT some might say it might even be a bit too much (after all I did use the enamel dobbers keywords three time in a H1 - OOP looming - I DON'T THINK SO)
However, we now look at le_gber full-time spamming black hat seo to 'optimise' the page, you may end up with something like this (changes in blue for ease of reading - please note he is not good at it):
<html>
<head>
<title>Enamel Dobbers, Enamel Dobber, Enamel Dobbers, Enamel Dobber, Enamel Dobbers, Enamel Dobber</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers">
<meta name="description" content="enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers">
</head>
<!-- enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers -->
<body>
<div id="hidden"><h1>enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers</h1></div>
<div id="w"><img src="enamel-dobbers.gif" id="enamelDobbers" alt="enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, "><h1 class="small">enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers</h1><a href="enameled_dobbers_gifts.htm">Enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers are a great gift</a> idea for you and your family. Why not visit our <a href="how_we_enamel_dobbers.htm">enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, dobber enameling</a> page to learn more. Alternatively you can learn about our <a href="enamel_dobbers_fullrange.htm">full range of Enamel dobbers enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers</a>, or our <a href="enameled_dobbers_worldwide.htm">worlwide enameled dobber distribution. enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers</a>[/blue]
and two for the road
<div id="hidden"><h1 class="small" color="SameAsBackground">enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers</h1></div>
<!-- enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers, enamel dobbers -->
<div>
</body>
</html>
See any difference between the 3 companies?
Well I do, and I don't think that the second one will get worse ranking than if he used
<h1>Enamel Dobbers from J Bloogs</h1>.
However number three might - that is if he get caught or someone uses the spam report (oooooooooooooh evil).
Off course you're welcome to prove me wrong.
Leo
But it doesn't prove that they don't receive any negative points for that. There can always be other factors that make it up.
But I have noticed once, that for certain query one page from my site ranked in top of SERPS - it had about 7% density for the keyword, but was targeted for the other one, while I had other page targeted for the keyword, with density about 12%, and it was nowhere to be seen. All pages in this site were optimized like in your example 1.
So there are facts that make people believe in OOP.
But we're far from any proofs, in order to state if there is OOP or not, we should make thousands of pages targeted on many keywords from different categories, control all other variables and compare results depending on just optimisation level. It can hardly be done.
Off course you're welcome to prove me wrong.
I can't. Just like you can't prove you're right ;)
(That's what makes this business so intriguing.)
I also want to add that it's not worth stickying me to get the site URL - I won't give it to you
We're discussing issues, not specific websites. Leo's a well respected contributing member. For the purposes of discussion you will have to take his word for it. What is under discussion here are concepts, not specific websites.
Keep in mind that Leo mentioned a particular website as a jumping off point for an observation that led him to initiate the discussion. The discussion is his assertion that OOP doesn't exist, and that what you are seeing may be something else. The website that caused him to think about this is besides the point. No need to limit the discussion, broaden it.
I agree, any test is impossible.
Your comment about the snippet of a very optimised page is interesting and presence us with a new filter... the user. I think the average user is learning to take more time examining the snippets and titles, making number 1 spot less important. I have noticed people doing this and stats are beginning to confirm that where there is a good title and good supporting snippet, traffic can be high and relevant, even if the page is ranked position10+
The 'feeling lucky' button on google must be used less and less, as people get more discerning and are not wanting to be sent to another off theme site! Its strange that Google still has it.
I suspect 2 years ago, people thought that if a site ranked first, it must be the best. Now perhaps they realise that they have to play their part in finding the right site, by spending more time on the serps page.
If all this is the case, then having text on the page that can produce a good snippet and be within the top 20, is perhaps more valuable than a top position. Thus the oop style of site is often filtered out by the user, if not by Google, because oop sites often produce poor snippets.
a) Spammers have a tendency to over optimise.
b) Google wants to get rid of spam.
c) Google has the technology to detect over optimisation.
Can someone give me one good reason why they would not use it?
If google were good at detecting OO, would there be so many scraper sites doing well in the rankings, even after the lastest update?
I don't think so.
I think le_gber's 'full time SEO' example is the only kind of page that will make it through the noise.
At some point, an algorithm that can deal with all the varieties of language becomes artificial intelligence- and I bet some of what we as humans can do to detect subtle spam is inductive, or nearly, which is nearly impossible for an algorithm to achieve, no?
If they are catching 99% there would still be a lot left. I hate to imagine what the serps would look like if most scraper sites were ranking well.
