How to Avoid Getting Banned by the Search Engines
Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask are a Bloggers and Webmasters Best Friends when it comes to ranking in their respective sites, but they can also be your worst enemy if you get banned by them.
There are lots of ways to rank high in them using keywords and backlinks. But there are also lots of ways to get your site banned and buried by them.
In this post I am going to list the ten best ways to get your site banned so you can avoid them when building your blog/sites reputation. Hope you enjoy.
duplicating your content or sites
Setting up multiple sites and pages with the same content using different keywords will get you banned so try and avoid this, use only original content which you have researched doing this will not fool the search engine spiders.
Cloaking your website or blog
This is when you try and rank higher in the search engines by trying to fool the spiders in reality it just normally gets your site banned by them. A cloaked page is set up and stuffed full of keywords for the spider and not for the Human visitors, so try and avoid this as well.
Linking to BAD sites
Another No-No. Linking to link-farms, Adult, Porn, Gambling and non-family friendly sites will find your site guilty by association. Also there are some SEO sites out there that say they can make your site rank higher using these methods so be careful and don’t link to them unless you are very sure.
Title Stacking
Is considered to be a dirty little trick by the search engines. This is where you try and add more than 1 title tag to each page so you can use more keywords. It’s not as bad in blogs as there is usually more than 1 post on a blogs home page but trying to add more than 1 title tag in each post is not a good idea and in a normal website is BAD.
Doorways or Gateways
Are usually set up for 1 Keyword Subject but usually take you to some very different content they usually have very little content and nothing at all to do with the rest of the site they are usually used to make the site rank higher in the search engines – time to contradict myself here – I have recently made a site about ghosts and ghost hunting and I made the homepage with just a Ghost, A Door and an enter button on it but you realize that the rest of the site after entering is all about ghost hunting so that is ok plus it makes the site look good its only wrong if you stuff keywords on that page to fool the spiders and rank higher.
Redirect Pages
What you see is not usually what you get. These again are set up to rank higher in the search engines and usually when you click on one they usually take you to a sales Pitch for a product or a service or to even harvest your contact details by saying things like “Find out how I made a 7 figure income working from home on my PC, just enter your email and download my report”. now some of these pages are ok especially if what your downloading is their FREE E-Book and yes I have downloaded a few myself, but I never usually pay for anything unless I think it is of value to me and I usually use a throw away email address like my one on G-Mail as you are usually inundated with 1000’s of emails off them after. If they ask you for money for one of those then your alarm bells should start ringing.
ASS Hehehe
These are also known at Automated Submission Services are against Google’s and many others Terms of Service so will get your site/blog banned by them, plus they usually cost a lot of money for something you can do for FREE. I usually submit my websites and content to the main sites like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask manually as 1 its free to do and 2 makes my sites and content rank better (Opps forgot 1 more. submitting your site to Alexa and inviting your visitors to write a review on your site is also good for rankings).
Hidden Links
Can get you penalized by the search engines as well. These are usually very small for human visitors but the spiders can pick them up. Again hidden links are used to rank higher and can work for a time but sooner or later you will get caught out.
Keyword Stuffing
Repetitive use of your keywords or spamming them will make your content look silly. This is not good. Your content should flow like a well written article that holds your visitor to your content.
Invisible Text
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Making the text on your site the same as your background is a way of trying to stuff a lot more keywords on your site in order to make it rank higher, but this usually makes your site look silly by having very large areas of meaningless background and again can get you penalized by the search giants.
Ok so that’s it then you now know what not to do in order to get penalized by the search giants and get your Site/Blog and content banned by them. There are lots of ways to get your content ranked higher like using and researching relevant keywords and I go into more details on this subject HERE, Linking to similar sites and blogs is also a great way to rank higher, adding more content and using a site map helps as well. Using JavaScript and Flash content on your site and blogs can be pleasing to the eye to your human visitors which can be good in getting them coming back for more time after time but do remember that this content cannot be read by the search engine spiders try and have a good balance. Remember Black Hat SEO is immoral and does not work it will only get your content banned!
As you probably know by now SEO and Good keyword research is a favorite subject of mine but I would like to say that the inspiration behind this post was an article I read earlier today by Terri Seymour which you can find here: 10 Ways to Get Banned by the Search Engines.
Of course this post looks very similar to Terri’s article and in many ways it is, but I have tried to put my own spin on it so it’s not a carbon copy of hers which is why I am giving her credit here.
Thanks for reading guys and please leave any comments you may have as I love getting them
-Phillip Dews
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