Over Optimization Risk

Many webmasters overlook an important part of search engine optimization: if you over-optimize your web pages, chances are that your website rankings might drop because your site has been designed for search engines and not for web surfers.

* Linking to banned sites - Run a test on all outbound links from your site to see if you are linking to any sites which have themselves been Google banned. These will be sites which are Google de-listed and show Page Rank 0 with a greyed out Toolbar Page Rank indicator.

* Hidden text or links - Remove any hidden text in your content and remove any hidden keywords. Such content may be hidden from view using CSS or alternatively, text may have been coded to be the same colour as the page background, rendering it invisible. These risky SEO techniques often lead to a Google penalty or web site ban.

* Over keyword stuffing - Remove excessive keyword stuffing in your website content (unnatural repetitions of the same phrase in body text).

* Linking to bad neighbourhoods - Check you are not linking to any bad neighbourhoods , link farms or doorway pages. Bad neighbourhoods include spam sites and, whilst link farms are just pages of links to other sites, with no original or useful content.