How Not To Get Banned By Google!

Given that Google now provides over 75% of all Internet search traffic, the last possible thing any site owner would want is to be banned from the Google index!

With countless search engine marketing techniques being employed these days, and contrasting advice available all over the net, it's well worth ensuring that you do not'over optimise' your site or use any techniques which will result in Google penalising your site.

Although the main rule is to create a website which caters to your viewers, provides quality content and contains meta information that's loyal to your website content, you should always optimise your website code to assist in your search rank campaigns, but this should be done in moderation, and consistent with the following hints.

Spam

Never, ever spam. This involves sending a large number of unsolicited email via your domain . Even though the legality of mass mailing is a gray area, sites that do this deserve to be banned by each search engine.

Link Farming

Link Farms, or Free-for-all links pages exist solely to assist recorded sites gain higher search engine rankings. All these are bad neighbourhoods and are frowned upon by the major search engines. Obviously you can not control which sites link back to you, but you can make certain you don't link to link farms.

Excessive Links

Now that so many webmasters are more obsessed with their Google Pagerank than the quantity of quality traffic they get, link pages are fuller than ever. You should try to not put too many outbound links on a single page. Should you have to connect to 100 or more websites, put the links on different pages.

Cloaking

Seen by many search engine optimization specialists as probably the thing most likely to result in a Google ban, cloaking involves creating one page created specifically for the search engines, and another which will look for the user. This is search engine manipulation at its worst.

Selling PageRank

Some sites have gone so far as to sell PageRank - i.e. selling links on highly ranked pages. You can sell links (i.e. advertising), but you can't sell links for the stated purpose of increasing Google Pagerank.

Doorway Pages

A couple of years ago, door (or gateway) webpages were as common as normal pages - these are usually little pages, crammed full of keywords, designed solely for the purpose of gaining high rankings. They generally look awful and a website which uses a great deal of doorway pages is very likely to be penalised.

Excessive Cross-Linking

Some webmasters create multiple website, often with similar or identical content. They are then heavily connected together with the sole intention of increasing Pagerank. Not suggested. In case you have a lot of websites, inter-linking is fine, but in moderation as with search engine marketing methods.

Submitting multiple URL's in the same website

An example is for a webmaster to submit mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html into the Google database, thereby essentially trying to get two search results for the identical page. If Google does not find a new website quickly anway, simply submit your index page ONCE!

SEO Software

Do not use unauthorised computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc.. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google's terms of service. Google does not recommend using products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

If you follow these tips and steer clear of excessive search engine marketing methods, you should be OK. Just make sure you create a website with is loyal to the service or product you're providing information on and you should be OK. Focus on exchanging quality links with similar websites and do not get too obsessed with your Google Pagerank. Quality, returning traffic is your goal.