Over-Optimized?
-
I have been hearing that the latest algorithmic changes address "Over-Optimization", which sounds very counter-productive for businesses.
Why would Google hurt the companies that have a narrow market or product offering?
Regarding over-optimization, does SEOmoz have a tool to help address those issues?
We saw a strange decrease in our "LMS" keyword, which is the core keyword for http://interactyx.com. I am trying to figure out if we are over-optimized.
Can anyone provide any suggestions and tools I can use to make sure my site now matches what Google wants?
Thanks!
-
No worries - I appreciate your attention to this matter.
It is a confounding problem that I am frustrated with the black box of terrible search results for legitimate pages.
I am open to an ideas/suggestion you may have.
Thanks, again!
-
Hi! I was a bit too hasty when I made the robots.txt comment. I do see what you did now there.
For the rest of it, I'll come back this weekend -- just catching up after being out of town for three days for Mozcation in Milwaukee.
-
Thank you for your response!
Most of the competitors for the term "LMS" dropped more significantly that my company did over the last 7 weeks. The search results for the term now have a bunch of junk pages, irrelevant pages and even Facebook groups higher positioned than legitimate companies that have been competing for the term for over 4 years.
For LMS, we camped out at the top of page 2 for a couple months as our best position ever for a couple months (ie May - Jul). I am not as worried about my Google Analytics results as I am about my actual SERP.
I could not be more frustrating to use all of the optimization tools, generate tons of relevant content and continue to get beaten by low Page Rank, junk sites in the search.
Use the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool for LMS and Learning Management System and compare to the Site Explore results for interactyx.com. Either the SEOmoz tools don't line up with what Google is looking for or there is some other problem here.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I do not have my blog blocked by robots.txt. I blocked the pages/categories that were throwing up duplicate content, per SEOmoz. If you see something here that I don't that may be hurting my blog pages, please let me know.
I great appreciate you taking the time to review my situation.
-
Have you looked at your competitors? Has one of them done something to move higher, thus moving you lower?
Over what time period are you decreasing for the keyword in question? If you're looking long-term, keep in mind that (not provided) now accounts for some of those declines -- you were seeing all of your keywords 18 months ago, but aren't now.
Is there a reason your blog is disallowed in your robots.txt?
-
Thank you for your response and for sharing those links.
Our main keywords are LMS and Learning Management System. I think I just proved out a case study showing that organic backlinking does not work. It looks like we are forced to purchase a service to buy backlinks.
After 4 years of pursuing our core keywords, developing 4-6 unique content blogs a week, optimizing the site to the point where there are no tools to help any more, having a large social media presence, hundreds of unique visitors a day and we still rank 38th in the SERP.
Google is broken. My last guess is that there is an over-optimization issue, but that may not be the case. So, is there any tool that can be used to gain some insight into this situation?
Wouldn't it make more sense if Google was open-book about the search algorithm so at least we can compete for the areas that make the most sense for our online presence?
Seeing the terrible pages ranking higher in actual results makes me think that the overall user experience from google searches has diminished to the point where people may start migrating away.
Thanks again for your response! It is appreciated.
-
Hi,
I have studied your site and your site is good, if you want to know about the keywords are appropriate for your landing page then SEOmoz tool of onnpage analysis is best. It can results many important factors about the keyword usability on page. Can i know about your targeted keywords?? because LMS keyword is now 38th position in Google.com. you can applied different link-building services for promoting your keywords and i suggest one thing that is do keyword variation for decreasing over optimization. You can also make strong social profile for social media marketing.
These all three links are best to understand over optimization.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-considered-over-optimization-for-seo
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Community Discussion: Are You Optimizing Your Brand's Content for Featured Snippets?
My latest post on the Moz Blog, Featured Snippets: A Dead-Simple Tactic for Making, explores how to keep Featured Snippets once you have them. I'm curious to know how many brands are actively working to get in the answer box, and for those who are, what's been the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ronell-smith2 -
How do we better optimize a site to show the correct domain in organic search results for the location the user is searching in?
For example, chicago-company.com has the same content as springfield-company.com and I am searching for a general non-brand term (i.e. utility bill pay) and am located in Chicago. How can we optimize the chicago-company.com to ensure that chicago's site results are in top positions over springfields site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aelite1 -
Ranking for keyword I don't optimize for & Other oddities
Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a clients website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda update because of some spammy links from a shady SEO firm. We've made a decent climb back but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords we don't optimize for: I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website. We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages. 2. Index not found when doing site: search: Other oddity is that when you search site:www.mywebsite.com, I see all the pages within the site except the homepage. Not sure whats going on here, but when I fetch the homepage in GWMT, it returns the homepage. When you query the homepage by itself, it also ranks. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscienceweb0 -
How to optimize on-page for a large service area?
Hello Everyone, I'm in the process of setting up a website for a plumbing company that services a relatively large area in Michigan. They have physical locations spread out across the area, but they want to optimize for other areas as well. Naturally, I set up pages on the site with unique content relating to the town/area. I understand that these may not rank locally, but we can at lest shoot for organic rankings in this area. My question here more relates to how to link these pages in the site. Should I have a bunch of footer links with something like city, state, zip as the anchor text. Or should I create an "Areas Served" page, and link out from there? I don't want to appear spammy, beaus this isn't what i'm trying to do, I just want to make sure this is done right. Thanks Zach
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seolinktools0 -
Are there different tactics to optimize for Bing vs. Google?
We are ranking very well in Google SERPS, but lackluster for the most part in Bing SERPS. i haven't seen anything that clearly lays out how to optimize for Bing, but my concern is that if we make changes to opt for Bing that we might lose Google ranking. Any insight as to what we might do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaHoku0 -
Niche sites: how to optimize them?
Dear SEOmozzers, I am focusing on those keywords I find using the "Keyword Analysis" tool that are not too competitive (among 20%-30% competitiveness). I then buy domains that include those keywords. The sites are in Italian and targeting the Italian search engines, so the competition is lower than it would be in the US. Basically, I'd like to build niche sites and I'd like to ask a few questions that I hope somebody with a good experience in this field can answer: How do I optimize a niche site. Specifically, how do I go about link building? How many backlinks should I get to see some results? How long does it take for a typical niche site to start appearing in the search engines for a certain keyword, after launching an effective link building campaign? Please kindly provide any recommendations you believe to be important when building niche sites. For example, is there a company/professional you know that specializes in this field and who is trustworthy/reliable? Thank you very much for your help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Google and keywords with and without accents. How to approach optimization for both?
This is more of a problem for people optimizing for keywords in spanish, french, german and such. It is well known that SERPs for keywords with and without accents are different. However, I haven't been able to discover how do I make the incorrectly misspelled keywords rank without messing up the site's content. Another fact to take into account is that more than half the searches made in these languages are done without accents because, let's face it, it's just too much work. An example of my specific problem: The misspelled keyword "cursos de ingles" is currently ranking higher than the correctly spelled keyword "cursos de inglés". However, the misspelled keyword "clases de ingles" is not ranking at all and the correctly spelled keyword "clases de inglés" is on the first page. How is this possible? Now, how can I optimize the misspelled keywords to rank higher without misspelling the content on my site? Thank you! Capture.PNG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 7decode0 -
Optimize root domain or a page in a sub directory?
Hi My root domain is already optimized for keywords, i would say branded keywords, which i do not really need, as the traffic from these does not give me any revenue ( mostly consists of our employees/returning visitors). Now i have run on page optimization for set of keywords for root domain which i like and got good grades (hurray!). But yet my website does not show up on search engines for those keywords. I have got pretty good link building done to my root domain but this is not done for all keywords (but done for branded keywords). It just happened, please do not ask why. So i decided to optimize inside pages in sub directory with new set of keywords i like. Starting with link building, giving anchor text on various other website linking to this particular page. These pages are not ranked in top 50 in google. Is that a good practice? or I would not need those branded keywords, hence should I re-optimize my root domain to suite my new keywords by giving less preference to branded keywords? Is this a good practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0