Web Moves Blog

Google’s “Florida Dance”
As most people have noticed by now, the last Google update, dubbed “Florida” has generated a lot of uproar amongst the business community and the Internet economy. This latest update is a clear example of the power of Google and what it can mean to a large number of commercial websites that depend on their rankings for the success of their business model and their viability.

There are many old and well-established commercial websites that have lost considerable rankings and that suffered a staggering loss of traffic in the process.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest and the most important algorithm change in the 5-year history of Google. Since November 15, Google has started to impose what some call the Over Optimization Penalty, or OOP. It’s still a bit too early to speculate what effect the OOP will have on some sites, but it might suggest to me that it may indeed be a form of static penalty, meaning whatever modifications you make now will probably not get your site back into the top results, at least not until the next Samba!

Therefore, you aren’t likely to see some affected sites return to the top for their target phrases until Google releases the OOP from those sites it was applied to. My feeling is there probably won’t be anything done until the next Google dance which won’t happen probably until December 15 or a bit later I think.

On December 2nd, somebody came to me and handed me his website that a previous SEO, a competitor of mine seemed to have “overly optimized” on certain important keywords of his. Although this article is certainly NOT meant to spam the search engines in any way, the following are techniques that can be used as a last recourse, if you feel some of the pages in your site have been affected in such a way.

Fine-Tuning A Website To The OOP
As is most apparent to many, Google is still experimenting with its new algorithm and continues to adjust as we are heading into the busy Christmas and Holiday season. One thing is certain: there appears to be no stability in the new algorithm.

For that reason, I would just sit and wait to see what the December update will bring us before committing to any changes whatsoever

Detecting If The OOP Has Been Applied To A Particular Page
You can determine if your site had any OOP penalty applied in any way by simply entering your keywords in a Google search, but you will need to add an -exclude for a unique string of characters. Example:

Your main keyword or key phrase blahblahblah

The -blahblahblah string of text doesn’t matter one bit- it’s simply a string of nonsense characters; you can type in anything you wish and it will work (!)

What is important is that you put the “-” character, which informs the Google algorithm to exclude the new spam filter which appears to cause the OOP penalty.

After running this simple test, if you see your page reappearing back under these conditions, it’s highly likely the OOP is in effect for that particular keyword or key phrase on that page.

Note that there is a possibility Google might modify how this type of search works, in an effort to prevent some people from seeing the results, but without the penalty filter. However, at the time I wrote this, that search technique enabled me to detect which of the penalized web pages have been affected by the OOP, so it is a pretty fairly accurate test.

More On The OOP Penalty
The OOP penalty is mostly related to certain incoming links to a page that is in fact penalized in a certain way. Also, on-site absolute links might trigger the OOP. In a particular case where I have seen a site receive an OOP ranking penalty, there were incoming text-links that matched exactly the keywords for which I made the search. Thus, if the incoming links match exactly with the text in the title of your page, your headline tags or your body text, it is my observation that the OOP penalty could be triggered by Google’s new algorithm.

Of course, it is extremely premature at this point to speculate on the exact formula Google is using to achieve this, but if a rather large number of your incoming links match exactly with the keyword or the key phrase used in the search box, it is in fact possible to trigger the over-optimization penalty in my view.

The Ad Word Conspiracy Debate
Since all of this can seem a bit strange, and since a lot of opinions or various ideas have been circulated in forums and different articles when all of this started in mid-November, and especially since many (including me) have discovered that the OOP penalty doesn’t seem to be consistently applied across all the Web, there are some people that have suggested Google might be in the center of a conspiracy to force companies and site owners to spend a lot more money on its AdWords PPC campaigns. Personally, I do NOT believe or participate in that philosophy and I don’t think it would be in Google’s best long-term interest to do that.

However, the OOP penalty does appear in fact to be applied mostly to higher traffic keywords and key phrases, the sort that commercial websites use the most. In retrospect, this does give some credibility I guess to those that think there might be a conspiracy theory to all of this, for what it’s worth.

Make no mistake about this. It is in fact the biggest and the most drastic algorithm change I have ever seen in the short 5-year history of Google. If a few pages in your site seem to suffer of the OOP penalty, let’s look at some ways to get out of this.

Some Solutions To The OOP Problem
For the most part, the OOP penalty comes from incoming links that perfectly matches the keywords or key phrases on a specific title tag or headline once on the affected page. There are a couple of ways to repair this. The first would be to reduce the quantity of the incoming links to your affected pages.

Another good alternative would be to modify the title or headline of your affected page (or pages), so that you have fewer occurrences of the exact keyword or key phrase that originally triggered the OOP penalty. For example let’s say the key phrase in your incoming link that carries the penalty is Construction & Building Materials and you have Construction & Building Materials in your title tag, as well as in your description tag and in your H1’s or H2’s. I would change the title tag to be ‘Special Construction and Building Supplies’ and see what that does.

You should also modify it and do the same for the text body of that page. In an ideal situation, it is imperative to try to achieve a ‘good balance’ that Google would consider as spam-free and not artificial. It is my thinking that too many incoming links with your exact key phrases in them, combined with too much on-page optimization and exact-matching text located within the target areas, i.e. the title tag, headline tags, H1’s, H2’s etc will likely trigger the OOP filter.

Conclusion
In light of all that has happened with update Florida, and with the drastic changes that Google has massively implemented to its PageRank’ algorithm, you should expect to see more upcoming changes of this algorithm, perhaps even before December 15, at which time some observers think Google might start dancing again.

As I have written in previous articles on this and as I was interviewed and quoted by the New York Post on November 27, I still believe that if your site has had little or almost no OOP penalties, in that case I would stay put and not do anything for the time being.

This article is simply meant to show a few techniques I have used to limit ‘some incurred damages’ already done to a site by an SEO firm that would have overly optimized a site, previous to the critical November 15 date. If your site was optimized using only Google-accepted techniques, according to their Terms of Use agreement, your site should not have suffered any OOP penalties whatsoever.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales