Can anyone tell me from experience how long it takes to recover from overoptimization penalties? Is there anything one can do to speed up the process?
For the onsite factors that is easy. Try to speed the process may be like a man running full speed with an anchor tied to his back.
If you site is over optimized on pages so just change the content and wait till it's refreshed and cached in the search engine again other wise get more links to your website and try to use a lot of variation in your anchor text, hope you will recover soon... Good luck.
Yeah possibly look into changing the content of your site, if you have too many keywords, remove some, if you are keyword stuffing, remove some, and check all your alt tags, make sure they all arnt filled up with loads of keywords. generally changing the content and not over-optimizing it again should do the trick. keep us updated on the progress if yo can
All of the on page changes you make will take effect the next time google comes by your site to cache it. With the new tag changes (meta, alt, img, etc if you were keyword spamming) and updated content (over use of keywords, hidden/small text, etc) the changes should take effect rather soon. Also another thing you should always be trying to do is getting more backlinks pointing to your website. By doing this it adds more credibility to the search engines by seeing your site referenced on many others. Please keep us informed on the changes you made and when you made them. Steve
Thats a relief. All of my sites are crawled frequently because of my concentrated link building efforts. thanks guys Actually im back on the first page for many terms.. g doing some strange things lately so that might have been the problem.. when i fall form first page to second page i normally assume that is an overoptimization penalty bcz it seems to knock you back about 8-10 spots.
8-10 spots are most likely just normal fluctuation. 8 - 10 pages drop, but for only a few days, can be Google dance too. A penalty is typically more severe and last much longer.
On one of my sites I severly overoptimised. I changed the onpage thigs that were obviously causing a penalty and within a few weeks my results were improving. It does'nt take too long mate. DD