As a Savannah web company, we found Google’s recent announcement regarding SEO very interesting. Have you ever heard of “over-optimization”? It’s the term used to describe a website that abuses SEO with tactics such as overloading keywords intro copy, exchanging too many links or heavily optimizing title tags. In attempt to fool Google and rank among the first sites in a search engines results page (SERP) for a company’s particular category, web developers will write website copy that is borderline unreadable to the average user with keywords being used in every sentence in order to trick Google’s complicated SEO algorithm. However, it appears that Google is cracking down to ensure that low-quality sites are not dominating the search results by penalizing the sites that have extreme and obvious over-optimization. What is the penalty for over-optimization? We’re not sure yet, as Google hasn’t announced it. It could be as extreme as shutting a site down or as tame as making improvements to its own algorithm to ensure over-optimization doesn’t positively affect search rankings. It will be interesting to see if and how marketers’ SEO strategies evolve with the new possible penalties.
