The real reason for Google Over Optimization Penalty …
It used to be simple, the rules where clear, the Search Engines and us had an agreement, We would tell them what our page is all about and they would display it when a user requested information about the subject, and now …
They had to make it complicated, they do not trust us anymore, we are laying, we are the devils who want to take their pressure search users and drive them to unwanted dark and shady places, this is what they are telling the public but …. by the way they are making more money due to this!
What have changed? Goggle figured out that in order to fight a few people who are doing a good job in optimizing their sites, in order to fight these “manipulators” it needs to define something which is called an “over optimization penalty” or in other words, “the trick how not to show the most relevant page to the user so he can stay more on the google search results page and may click some more adwords and create more money for google”
And it is becoming worst by the month.
Just an example, we had a page about a specific term, that was very informational and good for the client, it used to rank #1 just because we had the name in the URL, it was in the H1 tag and most of the natural incoming anchor text was (naturally) that specific term.
Suddenly the page disappeared from the SERPs, so we changed the page title to no include the term, and then it magically appeared.
After a month it disappeared again so we removed the H1 and replaced it with a large font title, surly the page returned again.
Then it was gone again, so we renamed the URL to not include the term and did 301, it came back
Then we removed the meta tags, and then replaced many of the instances where the term appear on the page with some of it’s synonyms, then we bought many more links to reduce the anchor text density and we used as anchor other stupid words …..
Man – where will it end !
The worst thing of all is that a clear page about a specific subject now looks more obscure to the user, and the more it happens the other engines are dropping this page in ranking as well …
I can only imagine that in a few years time what will be written on the page will be so cryptic that no novice user will be able to figure what the page is all about, something like: this page is about a 5 letter words where the 1st letter is the 1st letter also in the name of the 2nd president of the united states and the 2nd letter is the 3rde letter in the picture titled picture 1 on the page below, the 3rd letter is what your like to drink when …..
Is this where we really want to be ?
Over Optimization Penalties are wrong, find some other means to fight the manipulators an let us speak clearly to our audience and serve it better!