It has been a while since my last post on Google Filters and I wanted to continue the series today by discussing the Overoptimization Filter.

How It Works

Google frowns upon website owners who try to trick their algorithms by putting their keywords in too frequently throughout the webpage. This is often referred to as “keyword stuffing” and if Google catches you doing it they will downrank your website dramatically. This is typically one of the first things you want to look at if you have suddenly lost your high positions in Google – are you using too many of your keywords in your website coding?

The reason Google implemented this filter was because when spammers figured out how to manipulate Google’s rankings by keyword stuffing they quickly rose to the top of the index. As a result, the top pages were no longer valuable resources for visitors – Google had to crack down on the practice. Google blogger Matt Cutts even wrote about the filter recently in a post of his: SEO tip: Avoid keyword stuffing. When Google starts giving SEO tips, website owners pay attention.

What To Do

Identifying the appropriate keywords for your website is important. You should include them in your title tags, your meta tags (although Google does not look at meta tags for their ranking algorithm), and in your text. Use the keyword every one or two paragraphs, make sure you have at least 300 words of text on your page and keep the content relevant to the keywords you are writing about.

You also want to ensure that the content is significantly different across the pages on your site. Do not use the same paragraphs of text on different pages. Make sure that each page has its own unique content and that it is descriptive and relevant to the keywords you are targeting.

A good tip to use is to look at which websites are currently ranking at the top for the keywords you are looking at. How often are they using the keywords in their text? Use it as a benchmark for what you need to do to get on the first page in Google.

Evan Carmichael