Could it be harmful to over-optimize a Web page?

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Is it possible that an excess of off-page optimization of a Web page could endanger its ranking?

I'm not talking about the repetition of the keywords in the titles or in the text of the page; I'm referring to an excess of off-page factors.

Cheers!
#search engine optimization #harmful #overoptimize #page #web
  • The easy answer is YES ... by off page factors were essentially talking about linking. Google can track link velocity, anchor text, quality of links, ip address for root domains, etc etc and they are all taken into consideration for any site. This is especially true for new sites ... if your site is under 1yr old this seems to be a bigger factor.

    So ... an excess of optimization can and will impact your rankings. Which then begs the question of at what point is a site "over optimized". A quick google search for over optimized penalty will show you some sites that have been hit and what you need to do to recover.
  • Yep, it will definitely affect your website if you overdo it. Just build a few high quality links daily than just building thousands that may be flagged by Google itself. Quality is better than quantity, just take it slowly.
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  • Seriously, where are you guys getting your info from???

    NO, it is not harmful to over-optimize your site (off page link building). The worst that can happen is that it won't do ANYTHING!! SOMETIMES it might demote your site in the rankings for a short period if it is obvious spamming but in general you cannot hurt a pages rankings just by spamming bad links to it.

    If this was the case why don't you go spam bad links to your competitors instead of spending your time trying to find quality links for your own website?

    The simple reason is it just won't work.

    Sure, if you want good rankings then just build quality links to your own website. The bad ones just won't count that much.

    ~Dave
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [2] replies
    • Contradiction

      Taking the question literally, building too many links to your site, particularly if it's new, can cause it to drop or dance longer than it would otherwise.

      If Google wants to make an example of you (ala JC Penney), your rankings will be manually forced down until you clean up your site. But that's highly unlikely unless you're a huge brand and it gets SEO industry attention :p

      Aside from these rare examples, Google tends to penalise sites that sell links rather than sites who buy them.
    • Banned
      SO TRUE

      I recently did a test with over 100.000 scrapebox/xrumer backlinks on a 1 month old domain that had 40 unique visitors a day. My site started to dance a little for less then a week and my visitors dropped a bit, but within the same week the site stabilized and the visitors came back to around 40/day.

      To make things worse, the site I tested this on was a thin affiliate site with spun content. (7500 pages indexed)
  • yes... you are raising a flag to google.
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    • By definition you can't over optimize...

      Use your noggins folks.
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  • Yes, excessive offpage optimization looks unnatural and youll be penalized for it thoroughly. Onsite however, optimize away!
  • Check out the split in answers on this thread. The experienced war room members with high post count saying the opposite to the guys with low post count.

    Who to beleive? now thats a hard one. (sarcasm)

    I think that currently spam is not going to hurt your rankings particularly for the reasons dadamson gives but I also think that Google will be sweating trying to fix this as soon as possible so when they do there could be a big update and shift in the rankings with the spammers loosing out badly.
  • I don't think it affects in ranking. But yes quality links are more effective rather than quantity links.
  • That things count in Spamming. You also know about spamming effects on website and its ranking
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  • Technically speaking, it's either optimized or not... if you stuff too much, then that's not optimized.
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  • It doesn't sounds logical to me that excessive link building will effect the rankings. Will Google penalize a page of new domain whose one page spread viral and websites link to that page because of the content. Well, obviously not. Excessive link building is something else and excessive spamming is something else
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    • Hi privatenetwork,

      By definition, you cannot over-optimize, that is a nonsensical notion.

      Optimization is the process of finding the optimal ratio of keyword content. You cannot go beyond optimal, only fall short of it.

      What you seem to be asking is if you can go overboard on link building, which isn't in and of itself optimization, it is promotional link building. Optimization is the act of including relevancy signals in an optimal fashion within content you are creating.

      To answer the question you seem to be asking, I would say no, absolutely not possible to go overboard on link building if you are following Google's guidelines. However, many folks have the wrong idea about what is acceptable content and doing even a little bit of spamming is not good. The more you do the worse of a nuisance you become. So if you are asking if you can go overboard in creating web spam, why yes, you can. So don't do it, not even a little bit.
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  • No. We cannot control who or what sites link back to us, or how fast this occurs, so backlinks cannot harm your website. If they could, then everyone would be blasting links to their competitors' sites to knock them out of their high positions.
  • No, you should not do it for the safe future of your web page ranking.
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