What are the actual penalties for repeating keywords in google?

repeat keyword title Penalties

[caddie]

Hi Everyone,

Our web page has been dropped from the top 20 to position 300 for our main keyword.
We were trying to optimise the site to appear higher, and made the awful mistake of repeating a keyword 3 times in the title.
Other sites do it in the top 10, so we thought we would try this.
Our website has 1200 pages in google but our index page is lost in the serps. (position 300)
We have never spammed google before, always played by the book, rich content etc.
My question is this.
Our website gets crawled every day because of the pr5 ranking, if the site has had a penalty because of the titles will the spider stop crawling the page?
We have now changed the titles back to normal - will google crawl as usual and put the page back into it's previous place?
Please help - this is our first mistake.

[shady]

It is more than likely that your listing will return to a similar position to before. It is unlikely that you would be permanently punished for a minor indiscretion such as this.

It is probably not the main google crawler which is looking at your site everyday, so you may not see your "new old" listing appear for two months (assuming you've only just changed it back).

[caddie]

Hello Shady,

Thanks for your reply.

This spider crawls our index page every day nearly

Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
[03:40:19] /index.html

We have changed the title before and it changed in 2 days
last time.
What we are wondering is because of the drop, does the spider stop crawling or does it just crawl as normal, in which case we should be back to normal in a few days time.

We cannot afford for the page to be out for a few months for as you say a minor indiscretion

This brings in a fair amount of traffic.

What do you reckon?

[rfgdxm1]

I'd seriously doubt any sort of penalty is involved here. For example, an info site about mammals might create a page "Sloths- American sloths and European sloths" without even thinking about keyword stuffing. I've always worked on the assumption that SE algos simply ignore repeated keywords in a page title, and only count it once. Thus, repeating keywords is a page title is wasting space that can better be used for other keywords. The fact that I'd SEO by intentionally avoid repeating keywords in the title suggests that any search engine that did would just be penalizing webmasters who knew nothing about SEO a lot.

[shady]

You need to look at the IP address of the googlebot. If it begins 216. it is the "proper" crawler. If it begins 64. then it is the freshbot.

Your title may well change in the listings due to the freshbot, but I don't believe it will have any effect in the position until the rebuild of the google database, which happens roughly at the end of the month. This build will contain pages in the state they were near the beginning of the month.

Unfortunately, if your page was not changed back at least a week ago I suspect you will be lucky to see it back as it was until the beginning of January.

Sorry ;)

[caddie]

Ah that seems ok then.
We only changed the page on friday and changed it back today.
The page must have been fine on the major crawl.
Is the major crawl at the start of the month?

[shady]

Around the beginning of the month, yes.

Seems odd that your listings would have been affected at all, though! When did your position change?

Around 6 weeks ago, a change in google's algo saw a large reshuffle of the listing, resulting in number one positions disappearing into the 100s etc...

I don't believe the last rebuild had such a devastating effect, so I am surprised that your position would have suffered so much, assuming your page was the same around 6 weeks ago.

Maybe someone else has a theory? Maybe I'm incorrect regarding the title changes?

[caddie]

Sunday morning - this morning.
saturday night - same.

I think changing the titles made the site less relevant probably.

So hopefully in a few days everthing should be back to normal.

[caddie]

The major googlebot below crawled our site on the 4th november before we made any changes.

Visitor 216.239.46.82 [total pages: 1] [Arrival time: 00:49:46]
Referrer:
Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
[00:49:46] /index.html

Looks like we may have escaped sudden death!
Our busiest time is at christmas.

[shady]

Sounds likely - good luck anyway! :)

Obviously, I have no idea what your website is promoting, but I'd advise you to try and have a presence in multiple keywords rather than a specific phrase. Then, when you do loose position in one, you may still receive traffic from others.

As an example, in one of my sites I rank 250 in my main keyword :( (hopefully a massive increase will result in next month's rebuild), however I receive over 500 visitors per day from google with the other keywords I have targetted.