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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
SEO-optimized Data Visualizations (e.g. Charts) Tools
Hi there! We are currently evaluating data visualization / charting tools for rich content. Are there any open source solutions that work best in your opinion? Why? Some specific questions: Are static image / svg rendered images better than a javascript dynamic chart (canvas/HTML5)? Which gets indexed better? Is there any proven or perceived benefit to using Google Charts API that gives you an SEO boost? Are there tools for progressively enhancing HTML raw data tables to generate charts? Looking at a couple of solutions: Google Charts API C3.js Chartjs Thanks for your feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insurifyusa0 -
Optimize homepage for brand-name or local keyword query for franchisees?
We are launching quasi "microsites" for our franchisees within our main company website. My question is wether to optimize the homepage for the franchisee's business name OR a local keyword query? I know standard practice is to optimize the homepage for your company's brand-name, but in this case, brand awareness isn't strong for these new local businesses. Also, apart from the homepage and service page, there is not much room to create optimize content- other pages are simply reviews, projects and a contact us page. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimberleymeloserpa0 -
How do I find my Crunchbase Organization ID for Knowledge Graph Optimization?
With the depreciation of Freebase, we're moving some of our data to Wikidata. One of the identifiers (and signals for a Knowledge Graph placement) is your Crunchbase Organization ID. However, I can't find any reference to this number on our company Crunchbase profile. There's an application ID in the source code but it seems to be a different number length than other Org. ID examples I've seen. Anybody have experience and know where I can find this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattCommonBond0 -
Help: How to optimize my duplicate category pages
Hi all My category pages will showcase the same products how do I go about optimizing these pages so they don't show up as duplicate content? Would appreciate your all feedaback! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
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 -
How to be a good SEO optimizer while competing with a good ranked Bad SEO optimizer?
My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0 -
How can I keyword optimize for slight spelling variants, while maintaining consistency?
If my audience searches both "theatre" and "theater", how can I keyword optimize for both terms while maintaining consistency on my site? Does google at all see these as interchangeable, or are they treated as completely different words? city] theater and [city] theatre are our 3 and 6 best performing keywords, with theater getting roughly twice as many hits.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanWhitney150 -
What should my optimal anchor text look like, given cannibalization risk?
We have a content page with the explicit goal of ranking highly for "raised garden beds". We drive traffic from this page to our various types of raised garden beds in our store. The "FarmsteadRaised Garden Bed" is one such product. http://eartheasy.com/grow_raised_beds.htm Should we avoid using "raised garden beds" in the anchor text of the internal links pointing to the products in our store because of cannibalization? We recently changed the anchor text of the internal links to have keywords instead of just "click here" or "more info" - was this a good idea? What should our optimal anchor text look like?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aran0880