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Home » The Famous Blog » How to Avoid Getting Banned by the Search Engines

How to Avoid Getting Banned by the Search Engines

January 19, 2011 - Last Modified: February 14, 2013 by Phillip Dews

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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Filed Under: SEO

About Phillip Dews

Follow @D3vphp

Phillip Dews is a freelance website developer and designer from Birmingham UK. In mid 2019 Phillip started blogging on on the subject. Check out his best post on Rank Math HERE

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{ 60 Responses }

  1. Sabrina says:
    Phillip, this is an awesome article and extremely informative about the various ways someone can improve visibility on their blog/site. SEO search rankings will always be a concern and search engines are always evolving in response to the vast influx of information out on the web. One way to completely assure that someone sees the right links about YOU on Google is by creating a simple and easy Vizibility.com SearchMe button or link that instantly returns the search results you want others to see first.
  2. Linda says:
    Most of them I never heard of and would never consider, so I am happy to say that I don't think I fall into any of those categories. Thanks for posting, I have always wondered about that. Linda
  3. Darren Scott Monroe says:
    Good suggestions but one thing to point out. Google anyways said via Matt Cutts (ohh I wish I could find that video) that they don't really BAN for these reasons as much as lower you in the serp or place you in the sandbox often . Which frankly is enough to FEEL like a ban LOL
  4. Vijayraj Reddy says:
    many people use Hidden Links to get top in search engines, but as said one day you will be banned...
  5. chi3nming says:
    thanks for the tips dude will try to avoid those but linking to pron sites is seriously the dumbest thing to do HAHA
  6. Karen says:
    Thanks for post Philip One of the key points for me was about linking out to bad sites. I'm sure I am right that comments can also link out to bad sites so we have to be really vigilent when it comes to stopping the spam. Some comments are very obvious spam with tons of links in them yet some can be very subtle. You should always check the website link if you have any weeny doubts. Unfotunatley I checked a link the other day and was caught on a NASTY site which I least expected and it nearly crashed my computor. However I don't let things like this put me off in any way and always enjoy a good comment. Copying and pasting into google search often reveals comments getting backlinks by the thousands. The sooner google bans duplicate comments the better. I have a policy ...even if comments are genuine and the backlink is to an unethical site then they don't get published... they not pulling the wool over my eyes anymore :-)
  7. Arslan says:
    very informative...especially the part about linking to others and having others link to you.... thanks man
  8. DiTesco says:
    Great stuff. I fortunately have avoided all these "dirty" tricks for a very long time. I won't say that at a certain point of time, I have not used on or the other on test sites I had, but at the end of the day it does not pay off. Now the "ASS" thing, hehe, is totally new to me (just kidding)
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hahaha glad you liked it buddy! All the Best -P
  9. Aurelius Tjin says:
    philip, Nice post, highly informative. now i have the idea of not being banned by this giant search engine ( Google, Bing and Yahoo )..
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Cool glad you liked it Aurelius! All the best! -P
  10. Morgan Barnhart says:
    Hey Phillip! I think the greatest thing anyone can take away from this is the fact that building your site up takes time and to just let it happen naturally. :) It's funny, though, so many people think that pasting the same article to a bazillion different sites is going to raise their website, but it just doesn't work that way. Google is too smart for us! ;) Thank you for this!
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hey Morgan, Too True buddy, it takes time and patience, my personal blog is nearly a year old now and I have decided to ask for guest bloggers as I feel its well established enough as well as quite well known. Totally agree with you about posting the same articel on loads of different sites but its alright to post previews on lites like Ezine Articles and Squidoo as they can help with link building and SEO. Thanks for commenting buddy! -Phillip
  11. Pritam Nagrale says:
    These are some of the very crucial points in getting banned from the search engine. Doing black hat SEO can make you instant traffic but its a short term practice. Better you do some hard work and you will get the good results in the long run.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      True True Pritam, black hat in the end will get you caught out! im never afraid of hard work an so nowone else should! thanks for your comment -P
  12. Nasrul Hanis says:
    Oh gosh.. this is something that we should emphasize or if not, we'll regret for the rest of the year! I'm the one who practicing link exchanges and this is one of the things that worries me. Have to make myself clear and safe on this one! Btw thanks Philip!
    • Phillip Dews says:
      NP Nasrul, Am happy I could help, glad you enjoyed my post! All The Best -P
  13. Dennis Edell says:
    I assume redirecting pages for good purposes, like switching blog to blog is still OK, yes?
    • Phillip Dews says:
      TBH I wouldnt know Dennis, I am assuming its ok. I have changed my opinion on some of the points i have made in this post1 have a look at the comments below for more info! Thanks for you comment buddy! -Phillip
      • Dennis Edell says:
        TBH it must be. Redirects are an absolute must for not losing traffic when moving.
        • Phillip Dews says:
          I would have to agree with you there Dennis! thanks again for your comment! all the best! -Phillip
  14. Alex says:
    Hey Philip, Interesting and useful article! I think that it goes without saying the blackhat seo is usually something that works for a small timeframe and then it's just crashes. If you want to stay on the safe side, even though it may seem that it doesn't take you anywhere it will pay off later. Duplicate content won't get you banned nor will it make you receive any penalties but your website will most probably be deindexed and will never appear in SERPs. Having duplicate content on your website, like the same excerpts in a tags page and in a category page, it's not going to get you penalized, but only one page will show up in SERPs. Also, I am sorry to tell you that META name=”revisit-after” content=”14 Days” it doesn't have any effect on any bots, except one (I forgot it's name, but I know it's something about .bc domains or something). Google, Yahoo or any other known bots never supported this tag, but if you want to increase the crawl rate you can always use the Webmaster Tools options.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Thanks Alex, I would have to agree with your points, like I have said in past comments and redirects and duplicate content I have somewhat changed my mind. i did not know about the revisit-after tag though, will still use it though for that 1 bot so thanks for sharing! -All the Best -P
  15. Make Money Blogging says:
    Hi Phillip, Must say this is a great post. When everybody talking about how to rank up on the search engines, putting in these words of wisdom is sure going to help everyone stay on the right path. Though I do not agree with some of the points I think all in all this a good post.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      hmm what points dont you agree with will be interested to hear! I have changed my mind on some of them myself actually like the redirect point I made! Thanks for your words anyway! -P
  16. TJ McDowell says:
    Another way you can get taken off the search results is by changing web servers. Seem unlikely? It happened to me about a couple years ago. I should have left the old website up for a while at the same time the new website was up. The problem ended up being that Google didn't refresh the IP associated with the DNS entry for our site for a while. After it finally did, it still looked to Google like our site had been down for a long time, so there was a penalty being applied in the search results.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Sorry to hear that TJ, I have also read somewhere that Bloggers building backlinks and google rank to their 'blogspot' blog, lose it all when they decide to migrate the entire blog to a self hosted wordpress one. Imagine all that hard work building the rank and backlinks only to lose them all! which is why I always advocate starting a self hosted on like mine and heshams here! thanks for sharing! -P
      • TJ McDowell says:
        Yea, if you start a blogspot blog, you're probably going to be staying with a blogspot blog. I guess they could always add links in their template to point to the new blog to at least give it some link juice, but that's hardly the same as being able to move all the posts and existing SEO value over to a new domain.
        • Phillip Dews says:
          True True, just a shame I think and they say that google is not evil! thats pretty nasty to me when the blogger does decide to make the leap and get a Weordpress Blog! Hey thats given me an Idea for a blog post! hmmm something like "The Google slap for blogspot bloggers leaving" might have to come up with a better one than that! Be Well TJ and thanks for your comment! -Phillip
  17. Andreas says:
    The easiest advice is: Follow the search engines webmaster guidelines, they are always publicly available and pretty much easy to understand. You are the webmaster of your site, so you are in full control, make sure that you do not link to penalized or spammy sites from your site.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      True True, good advice there, you are very right! Thanks for the comment! -Phillip
  18. Phillip Dews says:
    Hahaha thanks Bryan I am glad you enjoyed the post buddy bit i can assure you that they are not human! in fact when I make a website from scratch I always put in a think called a meta tag that looks like this... which basically means that All the robots (or spiders as they are often called) from every search engine out there get to crawl all over my website and index then rank accordingly. you can even tell them how often you want them to come back and crawl over it for you by adding.... and just changing the number of days! Thanks for your comment buddy and all the best! -Phillip
    • Phillip Dews says:
      sorry guys just ignore this comment it was meant to be a reply to Bryan below! for some reason it ended up here! HeyHo -Phillip
  19. Tantan says:
    Nice post Phillip, it gives us insights how to do the right SEO. Overall, search engines always improve their features, any deceitful way to gain high rank on SE will not work.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      true true Tantan, I am glad you enjoyed the post buddy! search engins are always changing thinks from time to time so its always hard work to keep up with them! All The Best -P
  20. Wasim Ismail says:
    Thanks for the refresher, with so much happening online, one easily get side tracked and think something wrong to be right. If you follow the rules, and don’t cut corners, you will be safe :)
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hey NP Wasim, I am gladed you liked it! yea its always important to follow the rules if not people get burned! thanks for your comment buddy! -P
  21. Lennart Heleander says:
    Hi Philip, You are correct the most in your article, but linking to BAD sites like porn, adult and gambling can I see every day on high ranked pages, sometime is that the only links they have, up to 1000 of them, so Google don’t care so hard from where the links comes from.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Well to be honest if I did have an adult site then I would be linking to those tye of sites, but because my site is about blogging, web design and Internet Marketing, I really dont want my reputation as well as my sites going down by associating with those type of sites. thanks for your comment! -P
  22. hyderalis says:
    I DISAGREE with duplicate content & redirecting pages, your site won't get banned. If you are having duplicate content you can redirect them or canonicalize them.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Come to think of it your right there, but why would anyone want to duplicate their content anyway! yes its hard work making new content but for me that is joy in this job! I can safetly say that all the content i have written is unique but I do get idea's from reading others posts which aint so bad is suppose! what do you think? thanks for your comment Hyderali! -Phillip
  23. AJ Clarke says:
    Hum...I'm not to sure redirecting pages is always so bad. A lot of people are using redirects for their affiliate urls to make them validate, but also to increase commissions. I'm pretty sure that is fine. Famousbloggers.net is even doing it...checkout the banner ad at the top, it goes to the following URL: https://famousbloggers.net/go/scribeseotop - which is a redirect to the affiliate link.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Come to think of it, I suppose you are right! in fact I have just created my own url shortening service like bit.ly called smlr.me where a lot of my links redirect to various pages and profiles I have, I know its not the same as a redirect but it getting close! might try it one day! Thanks for your comment AJ All The Best -phillip
  24. Tom says:
    Great simple tips. If you know the rules, then it is easy to follow them. I had one of my sites get sand boxed and it took me a couple of months to work out the problem - hoping I got it right this time!
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hey thanks Tom, glad you enjoyed the post buddy! I must admit that has never happened to me before but I am sure it will one day. what happened? am intrigued to know what the problem was! Thanks for your comment and all the best -Phillip
      • Tom says:
        (on another of my sites)... I was using the eBay RSS feeds in their affiliate section and because of my placement and format, I was getting about twice as many clicks on the ebay links as I had unique visitors to my site. So for the two days I'd be out of the sandbox I'd make some decent money, but I'm guessing the bounce rate/clickout rate was too high that it got dropped in Google. Not absolute about that being the problem, but I removed the ebay links and have been ranking again for 4 days straight now - so probably too soon to tell.
        • Phillip Dews says:
          Ouch thats going to hurt! At least your ranking now! I would agree with you there about being to early to tell! Thanks for your feedback Tom! all The Best -Phillip
  25. Tran Tinh says:
    All points are good, just one question regarding redirect pages. I do not think redirect pages can lead to punishment as most of people are using plugin to do so with nofollow rel enabled. Please share more ideas on this, appreciate !
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hi Tran thanks for your comment, actually you are the second person to mention the redirect pages thing and to be quite honest I now think its not too bad a thing! might ask google stance on it then get back to you! Thanks for your comment! -Phillip
      • Tran Tinh says:
        Thanks friend, I am waiting for your feedback :-)
  26. Ryan Biddulph says:
    Hi Phill, Great SEO post here. I'm not an SEO guy so picked up more than a few pointers of what not to do today. I think that common sense wise, most of us know not to do these things but some of must might have received bad advice all the way. Kind of like the blind leading the blind, or the unscrupulous leading people who don't know any better. Create sensational content. Experiment with keyword placement and density, and most of all be patient and persistent. Google and and other search engines reward patience and persistence so the name of the game is not to attempt to play the search engines for quick results, because you will get burned. As Bryan said above, search engines are big on honesty. Karma points score big with them. Thanks for sharing your insight Phill. RB
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hi Ryan, thanks for your comment, i am glad you learned something today buddy! in our game its hard to know who to trust when it comes to SEO. I am by no means an expert on the subject but I think I know the basics. its all down to writing original content, building backlinks as well as backlinking others and having patience in this game. that in my opinion is what its all about buddy! Thanks for your comment and all the Best1 -Phillip
  27. Henway says:
    I think invisible text is OK in some cases, like in AJAX, when you want to display sections of your site when people click on a certain button, or when they scroll down. I also think there are many cases where the SE's just ban you for no reason, and there's nuthing you can do about it, except just not depend so much on them in the first place.
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hmm really, I would have to disagree with you there! people putting in invisible text where just the search engines can read them is a bad thing, like stuffing them with keywords to rank better. for me the webmaser has something to hide! I prefer to be transparent when it comes to SEO and keywords. but hey thats my opinion! Thanks for your comment Henway! -Phillip
  28. Ilka Flood says:
    Hi Phillip, Thank you for these great tips! As I'm still pretty new to a lot of this I appreciate you sharing your insights and keeping me out of trouble, hehe. Now, one quick question ... I heard that the duplicate content penalty is really a myth. I assume you are talking about something different in your first point, right? For example, if I write a blog post and later submit it as an article to different article directories I wouldn't get in trouble for doing so, especially if I change it around a little, right? Thanks for this great info! Ilka
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hey Ika no problem I glad you found my post useful. actually I have changed my mind on duplicate content when submitting to article directorys! i suppose that what i was trying to get across is copying and pasting the same content everywhere like blogs, profiles, websites just going over the top, but changing it arround a bit and putting up a summary of the content on article directorys or even as a note on facebook aint such a bad thing! thanks for your comment! -Phillip
  29. Bryan P. Hollis says:
    Philip, Good post. Most of this I already knew (but certainly not all). Much of it I didn't necessarily have a term for it, but knew it was a no-no. These are good guidelines for someone starting out that is really trying to get fast rank and fast traffic. I have realized that search engines like effort, hard-work, and honesty (d@#*, I almost made them sound human!) Take care - Bryan
    • Phillip Dews says:
      Hahaha thanks Bryan I am glad you enjoyed the post buddy bit i can assure you that they are not human! in fact when I make a website from scratch I always put in a think called a meta tag that looks like this… meta name="ROBOTS" content="all which basically means that All the robots (or spiders as they are often called) from every search engine out there get to crawl all over my website and index then rank accordingly. you can even tell them how often you want them to come back and crawl over it for you by adding…. meta name="revisit-after" content="14 Days" and just changing the number of days! Thanks for your comment buddy and all the best! -Phillip

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