Google’s -950 Overoptimization Penalty

Elliott Back — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 02:45:33 +0000

Do you believe that there’s a Google “-950 positions” over-optimization penalty? If you don’t, here is the proof:

That’s right, over the course of a day one of my sites dropped by about 90% of its traffic. How did I correct this? Well, I was using a plugin which generated a list of terms. If you came to this post, it would look something like:

Google Penalty
Overoptimization penalty
SEO -950 google

You get the idea–sequential, similar terms. It’s not just the terms density that triggers this penalty, but their relative locations to each other, and the relative density of phrases on the page. Google wants things to be nicely spaced out, so I changed this to a tag cloud view:

google penalty seo -950 optimization

Within a day, the penalty was removed and traffic was restored. Be careful when putting out tag clouds, or other clumps of similar branding or keyword content in your pages or you might fall afoul of a Google filter.

Blackhat SEO » Penalties

Google’s -950 Overoptimization Penalty