Task: Describe Twitter in exactly 140 characters.
Result: Like a “fun-sized” candy, life is made byte-sized, interaction relieved of character. Twitter is to conversation as porn is to making love.
OK, now it’s your turn.
[Inspired by Phil Baumann's Twitter Pitch in 140 Characters. Thanks Phil.]
Before moving on to the next part in our Google keywords series, I want to stop and give you a warning. As mentioned previously, our next step will be optimizing your site for your targeted keywords. The obvious approach would be to jam the keywords into the site’s text as many times as possible, so Google sees how relevant we are to this phrase. That would be a big mistake.
Let me share the story of a site I built recently. I had settled on a particularly good phrase for my Google keywords. Google’s top results were weak – the top ten all had low PageRanks (for background on PageRank see here). I acquired a domain name consisting entirely of this phrase. I set up my site to be optimized for it. I wrote the content, and squeezed in my Google keywords everywhere I reasonably could, without making the content appear spammy. Everything was set.
Under normal circumstances, I would expect to wait several months to see decent search engine results. After all, the domain was brand new, the site was starting out from square one, its PageRank was beginning from zero, and there were no other sites linking to mine. And all of those factors are negatives to Google. All I was starting with was a good domain, and a site that was highly targeted. I submitted my site to Google and waited.
In a few days, I checked how I was ranking for my keywords (you can do this with a site like this, or this Firefox plug-in). I was shocked to see that, despite everything going against me, I ranked number 17 on my very first indexing. This was an amazing result. With a few more pages of content and a few incoming links, getting into the top ten seemed like a sure thing. Number one was even within reach.
I got back to work on the site, being careful not to upset the balance I had established, and got ready to celebrate. In a few more days, I checked again to see how much better I was ranking.
The site had dropped from number 17 to number 107.
So what happened? I had over-optimized. Or to use the less graceful term, I was guilty of “keyword stuffing”. Keyword stuffing, simply put, means using your targeted Google keywords too many times. Google’s algorithms are designed to reward pages that focus on something specific, but also to punish anyone who might put up a page stuffed full of the same words just to achieve good position in their results. And I had apparently crossed the line – though interestingly, it took them a second pass to notice.
So where is the line? If anyone claims to know, they are lying (unless perhaps they work for Google, but Google guards their algorithms like the formula for Coke). However, it has been that the optimum keyword density is somewhere between three and seven percent. That is to say, your keywords make up no more than that portion of your content. You can check your keyword density with many different tools (just Google “keyword density“).
In my case, the various tools agreed that my Google keywords had a density of around 15%, making me look to Google like a medium-grade search engine spammer, and I was automatically penalized.
Although every use of my keywords was justified, and my writing included them gracefully, Google’s robots didn’t care. And there’s today’s lesson. You are writing for both people and computers. Be careful not to annoy either one of them, or you’ll be ignored by both.
I’ll report back as I make progress in clawing my way back up.
In my 2009 predictions, I wrote the following:
However, there is a dark spot for Google in August, when it discovers that AdSense is nothing more than a massive pay-per-link scheme. Google penalizes itself by reducing its own PageRank from 10 to 0.
Well, it’s currently late February, and we are inching toward proof of my prognosticatory powers. As Daniel Tunkelang reports on his excellent blog The Noisy Channel:
The other day, I was shocked to hear that Google was employing a pay-per-post stategy in Japan–precisely the sort of strategy they’ve historically condemned. I was certainly among those crying “hypocrisy”.
Well, to his credit, so was Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. In fact, he didn’t just complain–his team did something about it. Via “Google Penalizing Google” at Google Blogoscoped:
head of Google’s anti web-spam team Matt Cutts via Twitter writes, “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.”
I didn’t plan on checking the accuracy of my predictions until at least December, but it’s good to know that I’m well on the way to becoming the next Sylvia Browne.
