Thread: -950 penalty

So about this penalty.

Matt Cutts of Google Comments on "-950 Penalty" as "Over Optimization Penalty"

How do you know if you have over optimized?

Well if you have an example website, I might be able to tell you.

I'd say alot of it is common sense. Don't get carried away with stuffing your pages with keywords. Rather focus on creating a quality article, that has images / video / screencasts to go along with it (if applicable).

People get way too carried away with stuffing keywords in my opinion. While it may work in driving traffic to the page from a search engine to begin with, if users are leaving as quick as they enter I'm sure the Big G is measuring it (bounce rate).

If you read your own page and it seems like its difficult to read because you have placed too many keywords in it, that's probably a good indication.

The 950 is quite serious so IMO it's probably something to do with linkage rather than KW stuffing .....

Originally Posted by glengara

The 950 is quite serious so IMO it's probably something to do with linkage rather than KW stuffing .....

Probably right, on the Matt Cutts video he mentions the big daddy update. That was 2 or so years ago when reciprocal links were being targeted.

Still I think KW stuffing is bad practice.

Originally Posted by glengara

The 950 is quite serious so IMO it's probably something to do with linkage rather than KW stuffing .....

Yep - far more likely to be off-site factors than on-site stuff.
And I think it's fair to say those getting -950 are probably more technically advanced than your average webmaster (or exceptionally unlucky).

I was just wondering if it would be a subtle thing or an obvious thing ie keyword stuffing (I agree its bad practise anyway).

Could too much CSS be a factor? Is there such a thing as too much CSS?...

On-site/page over-optimisation used to be synonymous with KW stuffing, though IMO these days the cause is more likely to be the internal linkage structure....

k cool.

Thank you

This forum is awesome. I'm getting so many answers!

thanks again

I have seen that if one pushes one particular keyword too hard ,than google suddenly drops ranking for that keyword.It could be due to 950 penalty thing i guess.

Originally Posted by glengara

On-site/page over-optimisation used to be synonymous with KW stuffing, though IMO these days the cause is more likely to be the internal linkage structure....

That's an interesting one - how do you think such a linking structure would manifest itself?