5 Free SEO Tools to Check SEO Over Optimization

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:58 am

With the Google Penguin update, there’s a lot of commotion among webmasters. Many folks have reported quick spike in traffic while some, who have been safe all through the Panda updates earlier, reported lower traffic. As always, it’s a bit immature to make a judgment too early, as the update is only gradually rolling out. However, I think this is an update which gives webmasters a very strong message unlike any earlier ones, and SEOs are doing all that they can to make sure their site is alright.

One of the major focus points with the penguin update is the emphasis on “over optimization”. Any website/webpage that has a perfect or near perfect optimization might not get away with it on Google from now on, so its all going back to the topics of authority, relevance and crowd-wisdom.

If you’re worried about your website and want to ensure that your website is not over optimized, here are some tool that will help you do it.

1. Check Over Optimization for Keyword Density

Keyword Density is one of the most abused and misused SEO factor (though not prominent) among SEO metrics. Google’s anti-spam team loves this factors probably as its one of the most easiest way to find out an overly SEO obsessed webmaster. Keeping a check on keyword density and letting it stay within the safe allowable limits is probably a good thing to consider these days.

Here are some tools that will let you check keyword density. Keyword Density Analyzer, Keyword Density Checker.

2. Check Linking Manipulations

Any unnatural linking patterns in and off a website is an easy to figure out that there are manipulative efforts going on. One can’t be sure as to what exactly triggers a negative impressions here but patterns like 100% nofollow outbound links from a website is quite unnatural. The safe bet is to keep it normal by nofollowing the untrusted websites and following the trusted ones. Use the following tools to find out linking patterns within any website.

Link Analyzer.

3. Check SEO over optimization

Over optimization by specifying SEO metrics repetitive for a keyword can be dangerous – or so we understand from the recent developments. Use this tool to check the overall optimization for your website/webpage. It picks up phrases and keywords from the page and shows you warning signals. Optimization checker.

4. Check for Duplicate content

Duplicate content is more like a site health issue that can degrade all your reputation and authority. Many a times, similar content on websites can create problems for either websites. These days, with Google giving a lot of importance to content quality and uniqueness, its always safe to make sure that your content is not similar to anyone else’s and thereby avoid any ambiguity issues to search engines.

Use this tool to check content similarity between two pages.

5. Site SEO health check and recommendations

Many a times unnecessary focus on SEO can bloat up certain factors awkwardly like keyword density, H1 tag usage, image optimization etc. But at the same time, site health suffers as many technical aspects are overlooked. Its very essential that a website’s technical basics are right, because any optimization you do on top of that becomes pretty much useless if otherwise. Use this tool to figure out if your site has all the basic stuff covered and if the SE metrics are awkwardly standing out over optimized. I f yes, you might want to chop of a few unnecessary stuff.

To summarize, Google’s Penguin update for over optimization is more a warning for obsessed SEO’s to focus back on delivering quality content (again) and go easy on the “irrelevant” SEO metrics. Truth is that SEO still matters, and like I’ve always said, it’s the foundation you build for your website that matters. With good code, good structure and great content, whatever you build on it would be good. Fine tuning is fine, but a perfect 10 on 10 for each page with no real traffic probably can raise eye brows at Google.

The good news is that with the new Penguin update, many genuine content-based websites have reported a general increase in organic traffic since the update. That’s a nice way to balance out the not so pleasant Panda update. How did it go for you?

Also check out SEO Tools to find out Google Panda/Penguin Penalties.