Google Penalty? Maybe Over-Optimization? HELP

Hi guys,

I really need some help on this one. I have a new site/blog for 2 weeks now. I'm adding 2-3 posts everyday and all of my post's were ranked 1-5 on google since my niche has little to none competition. Lately I've been adding short posts and they still ranked well.

Most of my post's had similar first paragraph (around 50 words) for seo purposes and the rest of the post was completely unique.
All my post's had similar title structure too. For example:

SameWord1 KEYWORD SameWord2 SameWord3
SameWord1 KEYWORD SameWord2 SameWord3
I did some diversity but not too much.

Everything was fine until I added few widgets:
1. (Prev PostName + Next Postname) below the article.
2. Recent Posts (Sidebar)
3. Popular Posts (Sidebar)

Since my widgets showed even more posts with same keywords, after 2 days my rankings on google droped and when I searched for post title, google would only show result in this format domainname.com/category/example/. Instead of ranking my posts he ranked my category pages/not relevant post/archive page for search terms, but not my actual post.

I removed all the widgets now, but still waiting to see if something else happens.

P.S Google don't want to rank my new post after that happened.

Is this over optimization penalty? If yes, can I recover from that?
Should I make more divers titles and first paragraphs?

I really want to improve my SEO, I'm still newbie. Please help.

P.S Few post's still rank very well on google.

If it aint broke dont fix it.

I dont understand what you mean by SameWord1 KEYWORD SameWord2 SameWord3. Is it something like Camera Nikon D7100 Camera Camera?

Google ranking category pages instead of actual posts is a sure sign that some of those pages were penalized for over-optimization. All these penalties stands just for a short period of time and expires automatically in 10/30/60/90/180 days.

FBGuru said:

If it aint broke dont fix it.

I dont understand what you mean by SameWord1 KEYWORD SameWord2 SameWord3. Is it something like Camera Nikon D7100 Camera Camera?


Google ranking category pages instead of actual posts is a sure sign that some of those pages were penalized for over-optimization. All these penalties stands just for a short period of time and expires automatically in 10/30/60/90/180 days.

Click to expand...

Title Structure was like this:
Best Sony Video Camera
Best Nikon Video Camera
Best Canon Video Camera

I guess when I added those widgets I also added 10-15 same keywords on every post on top of existing ones in post's content.

Thank you for a fast reply.

crosnake said:

Most of my post's had similar first paragraph (around 50 words) for seo purposes and the rest of the post was completely unique.
All my post's had similar title structure too. For example:

SameWord1 KEYWORD SameWord2 SameWord3
SameWord1 KEYWORD SameWord2 SameWord3
I did some diversity but not too much.

Click to expand...

I think you got penalty for mentioned reason.
Use this to check penalty: http://toolbox.gabblet.com/google-penalty-checker-tool-check.aspx

I assume there were links in those widgets? How many external links did you add to the page when you added them? If you just dumped a ton of links on your page in one day that could be grounds for penalty.

My pages have only 2 links, I use pretty links plugin for custom shorturl with this option selected.

'Nofollow' this Link - Add a nofollow and noindex to this link's http redirect header

Click to expand...

Is this maybe the reason?

It's strange: 2 days ago I had 100 visits from google, yesterday around 35 and today only 1. I checked my site if I got any penalty via 3rd party sites and google webmaster tools aswell and none of them shows anything.

I only have 2-3 backlinks so I doubt I got penalty from building backlinks.

K.H.R said:

I think you got penalty for mentioned reason.
Use this to check penalty: http://toolbox.gabblet.com/google-penalty-checker-tool-check.aspx

Click to expand...

No penalty.

Almost guarantee it's over-optimization. Just wait a few days and check the last time they indexed your site. Next time they index it, the rankings should go up if you removed the widgets. PHPBuilt's Authority Site Building thread has a great explanation of all this.

Not much you can do now rather than what you have done - remove them, and try to figure out if this fixes the problem. That would be the easy way.

Usually though, just removing the problem that launched the penalty does not revert your site to its previous rankings. (It should, but this is Google...). You may be forced to do more research and a completely new audit on your site to see if there is something else wrong. Keep us updated.

Update: Ok, Google started to rank my pages again. Rankings are not so high as previous one but it's better something than nothing.

I seems that over-optimization was the case here. I learned a lesson.

If you are working on post optimization take care of your tags, widgets because they might add some extra keyword density and google can penalize you.

2 Ways to find if your pages has over-optimization penalty:
- Lower Rankings
- Google Ranks homepage, category pages, tags, archives pages instead of an actual page.