Very good question! First off, if it’s your website, you can use nofollow all you want, you don’t need to worry about that – there’s no penalty for excessive use of nofollow. You’re not going to get into trouble because of that.
On the other hand, over-optimization: there’s nothing in Google where we have an over-optimization penalty for. But, a lot of the times over-optimization is kind of like euphemism for spammy. Like ‘Oh, my keyword density is a little high, I’m over-optimized for keyword density’ often means ‘I repeat my keywords so many times that regular users get annoyed and competitors are like “Ugh, where did this content come from”’.
So, there’s nothing where we say ‘This has the hallmarks of a SEOd site’. If you have over-optimized, often you end up with a site that people don’t necessarily like, where it looks junky or scummy; just bad in some way.
It’s not as if we’re going to say ‘Oh, we detect signs of SEO on this site’ but certainly, you can go overboard; have too many keywords, or keywords stuffing, hidden text and that sort of stuff.
If you’re worried about that, come back just a little bit, edge back, try to make it better for users. Don’t worry about ‘Oh, I have too many nofollow tags’ or anything like that.
That won’t get you any sort of penalty.
Related posts:
- Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
- I’m using a template website (I’m an amateur!). The H1 tag appears below the H2 tag in the code. Does the spider still know what’s going on?
- Hi Matt, what are your opinions on optimizing an Ecommerce website where the main pages/products may not necessarily be rich in content?
