Over-Optimization Penalty Does Not Exist

[SteveGerencser]

This issue has been coming for years. I blame Google for starting it by getting people to worship at the little green bar. If they had never done that there would have been no metric that we could look at and say "see, I know what I'm doing". Each iteration after that simply made people more and more aggressive with link building. 10 reciprocal links are good, 100 must be better. 100 directory links are good, 1000 must be better.

Then you add in the fact that Google allowed sites that the search team hates to profit by using adsense and things get even more muddied.

I remember when the guidelines were slightly rephrased to allow for the possibility that a site could be harmed by links. Then we were able to do it. On a small scale in very specific scenarios, we could do it. Now it seems that we can do it in a whole lot of other ways. Questions have been asked directly to Googlers through private channels about ways to fix this and it is being looked in to, but the solution doesn't scale. At least not for webmasters.

This is why we changed our marketing approach a few years ago. We still build links like many others do, but we have a whole rack of other things that we do that work better, and faster, at driving customers to client sites so even if search engines vanish tomorrow, our clients will weather the storm just fine.

[morestar]

Well, today (as many of us know) at least Danny Sullivan cleared the air a bit with respect to the so-called over-optimization penalty - and as he mentions, a lot of people are running to and fro thinking they've done something wrong with their site when in fact they haven't.

I really don't believe the penalty in question exists and if it does to any degree I think Matt was more or less filling in some blanks with information he can give to the public like;

and we also start to look at the people who abuse it, whether they throw to many keywords on a page or whether they exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect

I don't buy it.

He also said in the very same breath previous to the above quote;

And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO

So Google doesn't want us doing SEO? Oh and so why isn't the whole world making much mention of this part of Matt's statement? Weird.

[Serj]

Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and try. The over-optimization penalty 100% certainly does exist. To try it, why don't you build 1000+ backlinks to your site every day for the next few weeks... your site will drop from Google, I can almost guarantee it... btw 1000 is an exaggeration, even 50 backlinks a day and you'll likely see that penalty...

[Mike-H]

I think the word penalty is being used far too often. Do this, that and the other and you will get a 'penalty'. It is likely that the Google Panda has decided that some links from some sites have lost value in the algo. This is not a penalty, it simply means that the Panda prefers a different type of bamboo to that which you have chosen to advance your site. Devaluing links can reduce SEO affects and prevents negative SEO on competitors sites. Its not a penalty.

[SEOforGoogle]

The only "penalty" I have seen is that for some "over optimized" keywords have lost their top rankings. The worst I have seen for my clients is a drop to the second page. But, they are still ranked for other terms (some even related to the keyword that dropped). When all this started, I had some people thinking that they were blacklisted because they were only looking at the keywords that had been delivering lots of traffic.

This tells me that Google has made a huge mistake - show blackhats exactly how to drop a site's rankings by getting thousands of scraped links with high traffic keywords pointed to victim's site, OR
Blog networks kick ass at getting a site ranked, and this knee-jerk reaction only confirms that method - people just need to be smarter about how they run them now ;-P

[termspec]

I recently received a request from someone to remove a link from one of my sites because it had triggered an overoptimisation situation. here is a copy of the mail I received....

Google has been in contact with us and asked us to remove this unnatural link as it will penalise both the "clientwebsite.co.uk" website as well as the "mywebsite.com" website.

Google have also asked us to inform them of any websites that are not cooperative in this request, and to provide them with the domains and ip addresses of sites that do not comply with the request.

so does it exist?

[PhilipDunn]

I recently received a request from someone to remove a link from one of my sites because it had triggered an overoptimisation situation. here is a copy of the mail I received....

QUOTE
Google has been in contact with us and asked us to remove this unnatural link as it will penalise both the "clientwebsite.co.uk" website as well as the "mywebsite.com" website.

Google have also asked us to inform them of any websites that are not cooperative in this request, and to provide them with the domains and ip addresses of sites that do not comply with the request.

Endquote

so does it exist?

This is certainly a surprise to to hear...

@More - I've also watched Matt say that that they don't want to end SEO. I do know they have a 5 year plan to end black hat techniques, which started a few years ago.

Penalties - I had a client fire me and hire a black hat SEO. The first thing they did was to add hundreds of keyword embedded external links to the site. They fell out of the rankings almost instantly and hired me back a few weeks later. But there was no doubt there was some sort of penalty involved. I put up the old site and our rankings immediately returned.

[SteveGerencser]

I recently received a request from someone to remove a link from one of my sites because it had triggered an overoptimisation situation. here is a copy of the mail I received....

QUOTE
Google has been in contact with us and asked us to remove this unnatural link as it will penalise both the "clientwebsite.co.uk" website as well as the "mywebsite.com" website.

Google have also asked us to inform them of any websites that are not cooperative in this request, and to provide them with the domains and ip addresses of sites that do not comply with the request.

so does it exist?

Usually this is someone going around trying to get links removed from a website to cause harm in a different way. If you throw thousands of links at a site you can get it bounced in the short term. But if you also go around and get their 'good' links removed before the site recovers, it never will recover. Google will remove the penalty and their site will not recover because the good links are now gone.

Personally, I would ignore any such request if I had a legitimate reason for the link to begin with. If you had linked to them in exchange for a link, or cash, or whatever, remove it.

This tells me that Google has made a huge mistake - show blackhats exactly how to drop a site's rankings by getting thousands of scraped links with high traffic keywords pointed to victim's site, OR
Blog networks kick ass at getting a site ranked, and this knee-jerk reaction only confirms that method - people just need to be smarter about how they run them now ;-P

Black hats knew this all along. What it has done is show white hats, non believers and "clients" that it was possible.

[termspec]

this was not the first time I had seen this type of request made for a removal of a link from my article site. I belive the requests to be genuine as on both occasions the persons requesting the links to be removed replied thanking me for co-operating.

[chrissponias]

Thank you all for this information. I was trying to understand what is happening online. My sites’ traffic dropped. So, I used a backlinking service last week, but I was worried thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t have done that.

Now I see that it was a good idea, and I don’t need to be afraid of backlinking. The results were good, and my sites are in a better position, even though they suddenly got numerous backlinks.