What Happens When Optimization Becomes Overdone? By David Bain At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. This is the rule that every search engine optimization professional and web master must follow to avoid being severely punished by search engines. And believe me; search engines do punish web sites that overstep the bounds of good and acceptable SEO practices. You can end up being banned from search engine indexes and if this happens, where would you be? Nobody likes being made a fool of and search engines are no exception.

--- Cloaking and Camouflaged Text ---

One very “black hat” or very unacceptable search engine optimization practice is cloaking. Cloaking occurs when a web master creates two sets of web pages. One set is for search engine spiders and the other set is for human visitors. When a search engine query is made, the search engines will browse through their indexes to find a result that would be relevant to the surfer’s query. When the web site detects that a search engine sweep is happening, it will show the set that is packed full of keywords relevant to the search query. This guarantees that the web site gets returned at the top of the results list or at least near the top of the list. When the web surfer opens the link to the web site, the correct set of web pages is presented. The visitor would then find out that the web site does not contain the content he or she is looking for. Sometimes, the content is not even related to the query.

Camouflaged text is incorporating in your web site body lots of keywords that have the same color as the background. The visitors do not see these camouflaged texts when they read the content of the website but the search engines are fooled into returning the web site at the top of the results list because of the wealth of relevant keywords it apparently has.

Cloaking and camouflage text are very risky optimization techniques that carry dire penalties when a web site is caught.

--- Keyword Padding ---

It is good to have more keywords in your pages because the more keywords you incorporate in the body, the higher your page ranking will be when that keyword or related keyword is used in a search engine query. However, have you ever read an article so keyword rich that you cannot understand it? This is the work of SEO experts who interpret keyword dense to mean keyword packed. This is something that search engines frown upon, and due penalties are given for such infractions.

Remember that 3 to 7 percent keyword density is acceptable but anything beyond that can only be considered keyword padding. And also keep in mind that keyword packed articles are not fit for human eyes. You may be able to get to the top of search engine ranking, but for what? Your visitors are likely to get exasperated when they try and fail to understand what your site content is trying to say. Thus, you are not likely to get any sales, and increasing web traffic without increasing customers is an exercise in futility.

--- Redundant Content ---

Some web masters lift content from one page of the web site and paste it to another page or to other pages of the same site. It is these web masters’ belief that doing so would be able to increase keyword density without keyword padding. And with this the relevance of the web site in keyword queries increases. This is another overdone optimization effort that does no good because search engines do check for redundant and copied content!

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