Many webmasters have been left scared after Matt Cutts announced an upcoming “over-optimisation” update and/or penalty. People all over the world are now scrambling to clean up their acts while others consider giving up SEO altogether out of pure fear. Some SEO experts have dismissed the fear as irrational, while others tried to explain what the update might be about.
It’s difficult to find a proper definition of what “over-optimisation” is, it sounds like an oxymoron, as usually you can’t over-optimise something. Optimisation is a synonym of improvement. Can you improve your website too much? No, it’s rather about a few common SEO tricks that have plagued the Web for years by now.
Luckily Matt Cutts already has given us a few hints what he has in mind and what the Google engineers are currently working on.
In this post I’d like to explain what Google most probably considers over-optimisation. In the second step I will attempt to suggest long term SEO strategies that will make you immune to this over-optimisation update and future updates of this sort.