Can you overlink a set of keywords?

[Zanet]

I studied my keywords and noticed several around page 2 or 3 on SERPS

So i made an assumption that some good internal linking using the keyword in the anchor text in the same site would push the rankings up to page 1

In effect i used the "Blogroll" style links in WordPress so i had a top 10 searched area listing these 10 keyword rich links on the right column of EVERY page

Since then my traffic overall on the site has gone down
its almost a month since this change

So what should i do?

A) Assume Google/search engines doesn't like 100s of links on a right column and therefore its triggered a negative score

B) Allow more time than a month

C) Remove the links from the right column of every page and just add the key word to the landing page a few more times natuarlly into the content

D) None of the above...instead tell me what you would do


Many thanks for your time

Zane

[goodbyedee]

Hello Zanet

How old is your site? For how long have your site been at 2-3? For how long are you seeing your site going down?

I don't believe that the links hurt you. Maybe they didn't do any good, but they didn't do harm either.

You should definitely be patient as indexing of changes has become very slow lately.

In general my advice would be to improve you content as much as possible, make sure all on site optimization is done (Titles, Headers, alt, etc) and start getting inbound links from related sites.

[Zanet]

Hi googdbyedee
the site is over 3 years old a
the down turn happened a month ago around the time i fiddles with these links as described above

Do you think a month is long enough to see the results

I think I'll take heed of your other ideas to improve the content and links in

I guess I thought internal links in was what i was trying to acheive

[Robert Charlton]

...i had a top 10 searched area listing these 10 keyword rich links on the right column of EVERY page...

...100s of links on a right column...

I'm not understanding whether you've added 10 links to your page template (100s of links to the site overall), or whether you've added 100s of links to the template.

IMO, adding 100s of links to the template would confuse Google quite a bit.

Adding 10 links to a template might not, but the devil is always in the details.

Well chosen links from paragraph areas in appropriately related pages are likely to be a better approach in this case.

[ecmedia]

Zanet, in some cases this triggers an overoptimization penalty. While almost everything about G is a black box, you might be a victim of a 30/60/90 day penalty in the best case scenario.

[Zanet]

Thanks RC and ecmedia for replies

@RC
its 10 links

<snip>

@ecmedia
yes i wondered if a months not long enough
so it could be upto 90 days - interesting

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:09 pm (utc) on Aug 16, 2010]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

its 10 links

10 global nav links with natural and varied vocabulary are extremely unlikely to cause any kind of penalty. For discussion on what is causing penalties these days, see this current thread....

Possible Causes of Google Penalties
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4187294.htm [webmasterworld.com]

The idea of monitoring your serps and boosting pages you'd like to boost makes some sense, but you might also want to consider whether 10 particular pages are worth boosting in terms of potential traffic.

Keep in mind that adding links to your home page or global navigation redistributes the flow of link juice, dividing it up into more channels or branches. So each link you add to your global navigation reduces the flow to existing nav links, perhaps giving a single page as much prominence as a category with a dozen articles.

It's up to you to decide whether the new links you're adding warrant the extra share of user and search engine attention they'll be getting by being featured globally.

[Zanet]

@RobertCharlton
You make some very valid points

So to accomplish what I want to do what would you say is a better way to optimise or boost keywords that are on page 2 and 3 of the Serps

if I have title and keyword naturally mentioned in content and alt tag of image is there any other obvious checks to achieve an improved ranking on a landing page for a particular keyword

[freejung]

Since then my traffic overall on the site has gone down

It's hard to say what's going on without knowing what portion of your traffic went down.

Was it the traffic to these particular pages, from these particular keywords that went down? What about the rankings for those keywords?

Or was it traffic that was going to other pages (probably pages that were on your main nav before) that were already doing well that went down? How are those pages ranking?

I would spend some time looking at the traffic for particular keywords and classes of keywords and try to find out exactly where the traffic loss is coming from, and then adjust your link structure to redirect juice accordingly.

As for how to boost these particular pages - make sure they're well-optimized (standard stuff, exact keyword match in title, body text, headings, image alt text etc) which it sounds like you've done, and then as Robert said, link to those pages with keyword-rich text from within the content of other closely related pages. That way you're not redistributing a lot of juice from your global nav, but you are increasing the relevance of those pages with on-topic links.

Another thing you might consider is optimizing another page for the same keyword, to try to get a second listing. That can increase your clickthrough a lot even if your ranking stays the same.