Search engine traffic is a vital commodity for just about any Internet marketer. Most of us exhaust serious time, effort and resources to optimize our websites in an effort to get them ranking for our target keywords. It’s ironic, though, that in our desire to rank higher in Google’s SERPs, we end up hurting our sites more than helping them.
It’s actually more common than you think. People who are new to SEO think it’s some kind of black magic that gets better the more that you do it. However, there’s a distinction between doing it more and doing it right. As a result, some novice SEO practitioners end up getting their websites sandboxed.
Sandboxed is the term used in the SEO community to describe a the effects of a Google-penalized site. Once sandboxing sets in, a website experiences diminished search engine rankings. In worse cases, some or all of a site’s listings can be omitted by Google from its SERPs.
Needless to say, sandboxing is very bad news because it cuts your site off from millions of potential business leads. The scary thing about sandboxing is that you can get nailed by Google even if you have no intention of breaking its rules.
Forget link buying, cloaking and other shady black hat tactics. In a blog post by ShirtsThatGo over at the SEOMoz blog, he tells the story of how he got flagged for over-optimizing his ecommerce site’s copy. As a result, some pages didn’t show up at all in Google searches. At the end of the day, the issue and the solution turned out to be far simpler than he initially thought. He writes:
“My other product pages ranked so well that I was afraid to change anything. When I started to actually listen to what Dean was saying I took another look. Upon closer inspection the Ice Cream Truck page had maybe five more instances of the keyword than all the other product pages. I took a chance and backed way off the keyword count. I figured nothing would happen at all and that my needle in a haystack problem would still be there. On the next crawl the page was in position one on page one for the target keyword. Could it be this simple? I was blown away! I had badly overstuffed my site and my problem was so easy to fix!!!
For any given page there is clearly a keyword limit and the algorithm will simply flag the offending page and refuse to serve it up. Stay above the limit and the page is banished. Drop below the limit and it will rank! My expectation is that this is going to differ somewhat from page to page but the rule will hold.”
I can’t say I agree with everything that the poster asserted there, but one thing’s for sure: keyword stuffing will never get you anywhere. Listen, this isn’t the late 90s when search engines were dumb. Google has blazed the trail in going beyond counting keyword repetitions and measuring density. Over the years, Google has grown to understand human writing better, and it knows if your keywords are being used naturally or if you’re intentionally mentioning them to try and fake your way to relevance.
I’ve said it before that humans need not adjust to the writing preference of search engines because search engines are making all the efforts to try to understand us. The more we try to write for computers, the more we’ll struggle with SEO. Besides, keyword usage is just one factor in getting good rankings. The biggest factor is the volume of relevant and legitimate inbound links pointing to a web page. Unique, well-written content that’s made for humans gets more links than robotic “optimized” text. If you really want to rank, you have to write good articles for your readers and not the bots.
I’m not saying that using keywords is something you shouldn’t bother with. What I’m telling you here is that you should do it as naturally as possible. Using your target words and phrases in your title tags, URL slugs, H1 tags and maybe the first sentence or paragraph of an article should be enough. After that, write your article as you naturally would. As long as you stay on topic, the keywords would come out by themselves.
Remember, Google and other search engines use latent semantic indexing (LSI), which means they understand the context of your content and recognize that pronouns and synonyms are used in place of specific target keywords. Bottom line, we write to communicate with fellow members of the homo sapiens family and not to adhere how we think programs perceive us. If you’ve been sandboxed and you can’t figure out why, look at your content and try to assess if you’ve been overdoing your SEO writing.
Until then,
Andy
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