SEO guide for beginners #1

How to prevent getting banned from Google

Google places a very strong emphasis on the quality and relevancy of their search results. As the undisputed leader in the world of search engines, they know that in order to stay on top they must make sure that their users are satisfied with the quality of the search results provided. To that end, they do not take kindly to several techniques used by many webmasters and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts.

These techniques can and will get a site banned from Google or at the very least result in a Google Page Rank penalty.

When your site will be banned by Google you can lose your business, or money, or contacts.. The best way to attain a high PR and placement in the Google listings is to stay on Google’s “good side”! Read the list and “don’t the same”

Submitting multiple URLs for the same site – An example would be submitting mysite.com, mysite.com/index.html and mysite.com/about.html to their database, thereby essentially trying to get more requests for the same site;
Submitting multiple URLs for the same page – An example would be submitting mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html to their database, thereby essentially trying to get two search results for the same page;
Cloaking – Cloaking is having two separate pages, one optimized for the search engines and a different one optimized for the viewer. In other words the search engine sees one page but the user is redirected to a different page when the link is clicked;
Doorway pages – In order to get a good listing in the search engines, some webmasters will load the home page (or special optimized page) with keywords. But a page filled with keywords comes across as nonsense to a human viewing the page. Therefore the webmaster will do a redirect to another page (using a JavaScript (JS) code or special meta-tags directives) that is much easier to read (or have the user click a link to get to that page);
Hidden text – Some webmasters will place hidden keywords on a page and make the font color the same (or nearest) as the background color (for example white text on a white background). This renders the text invisible to the human eye but the search engine spiders can still see it. Another way to place a tiny font-size (1px for example). This results in a higher Page Rank and search engine listing for those keywords. Hidden text is often used on a doorway page. Using hidden text is a sure way to get banned from Google fast!
Hidden links – The number of pages that link to one of your pages has a direct effect on how high your page appears in the search results (and that page’s PR). Many of webmasters hiding links into 1px-images or into ’space’. Somebody using ’smiles’ to place the hiding links. As with hiding text, hiding links will also result in a ban or PR penalty;
Link farms – A link farm is loosely defined as a page that lists links solely or mainly for the purpose of achieving a high Google PR. Free-For-All (FFA) links pages are often considered link farms by Google. Be careful who you link to! Realistically, you can’t control who links to you, so incoming links will not hurt your site’s ranking. But you control directly who you link to so Google will ban or penalize your site for linking to a “bad neighborhood”;
Spamming – Don’t send unsolicited commercial emails (SPAM). Don’t put meaningless comments to blogs and forums. Don’t irritate users;
Multiple identical sites/domains/sub-domains – In order to increase PR, some webmasters will create and interlink multiple pages all with identical or very similar content. This is a bad practice, becouse Google can recognize duplications. But don’t mix it up with site-satellites that used to describe more detailed an one topic of the main site and link to main site;
Excessive links – Google recommends having no more than 100 links on any given page. Having more than 100 links won’t result in a ban but it can result in a lower PR.