Optimisation - Paranoia?

Could certain tags be counter-productive?

[Simsi]

Hi guys,

This may be silly and worthy of shouting down, but I was thinking about certain "guidelines" dished out by GG and G itself recently and it made me wonder something.

Certain things, like for example "rel=nofollow" tags are only really going to be used by people who SEO. Certain META tags similarly and i'm sure there is other stuff that is recommended that the average Joe wouldn't otherwise think of using.

On the basis that Google, although obviously wanting clean well-developed webpages, is more interested in sites offering valuable content than perfectly SEO'ed sites, is it not possible that certain tags like this could be used to identify over-optimisation?

Or is this just paranoia? I only ask as my site recently took a G! serps nosedive and one of the few changes i'd made prior was the addition of nofollow tags.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

Simsi

[2by4]

Many blogs and cms products now come with nofollow built into their user added links, it's totally normal. Given that thousands of new blogs are created every day, I'd say googlebot will just not follow the nofollow attribute of the link. In other words, don't worry about it.

Same for most meta stuff, keywords, description, these are totally standard, although you might watch out for going overboard on abusing them, mostly because that might trigger something on some search engine, I just uses description and keywords, if I use keywords, which I almost never do anymore, for what they are meant to be used for.

One thing though, careful with certain attributes, title, name, and so on. Keyword stuffing those is definitely a bad seo trigger, and as far as I'm concerned, anyone who tries doing something that sad deserves to lose their ranking.