Don't Get Banned BY Google..!!!

In the last post we talked about avoiding keyword stuffing which can cause your website to be banned by Google.

Similarly some other onpage optimization factors which may get your website punished by search engine, specially Google, are as follows.

• Hidden Text
• Alt Image spamming
• Meta tag stuffing
• Title tag stuffing
• Duplicate Content or Websites
• Doorway Pages
• Redirect Pages

Now, let’s discuss above listed factors in detail:

Hidden Text

Hidden Text is simply text that users can’t see when they visit your web page. How can text been hidden? Well, there are a variety of ways - some are more sneaky than others. Some webmaster will do this so that they can add keywords throughout their web page without it interfering with what the visitors actually see. But is boils down to this: it is considered hidden if the text or link is invisible to the website visitor but can be seen by search engine spiders. This used to be done quite often, such as making your text white on a white background or using cascading style sheets (CSS) to hide your text, but search engines can easily spot this today so it is best to avoid it altogether.

For example, let’s say you have a white background on your website. If you wanted to hide text, you would simply make the color of your text white (#FFFFFF) and users couldn’t see it.

Webmasters incorrectly or say intentionally use the above method for keywords that they want to rank well for and want the search engines to see when they first visit their website. Yet, they don’t want their visitors to see this text. So, they’ve made the text white, to blend in with the background.

Alt Tag spamming

This is another way that people will try to cram keywords into their website, allowing search engines to see their keywords, but not allowing visitors to notice any difference in their website.

For example a website that wanted to rank well for “civil engineering” has inserted a graphic of a civil engineering product. And now, they’ve then added an alt image tag to the graphic.

When a visitors visits the website, hovers their mouse over the civil engineering product graphic, a little popup will appear repeating the keyphrase “civil engineering products, civil engineering softwares, civil engineering, engineering products, engineering, civil engineering instruments”

Notice how many times they’ve repeated the word “civil engineering” and “engineering”? Way too many! It serves no purpose other than to cram as many keywords as possible into their webpage.

The real purpose of an alt image tag is if a user visits your website and the graphic will not load, or is disabled by their web browser, text will appear instead of the graphic. This is often used for blind people. Alt image spamming is something you want to stay clear of. Using alt image tags is an excellent marketing practice, but you can overdo it as you can clearly see above. A good alt image tag in this case would simply be: "civil engineering products and instruments".

Meta Tag Stuffing

What I’m referring to here is when people throw in thousands of the same exact keyword into their meta tags.

For example, a website is trying to rank well for “insurance” and uses this keyword meta tag: Insurance,health Insurance,Insurance,Insurance India,Insurance Insurance

This is obviously ridiculous. Google does not use Meta Tags when ranking websites - so why waste your time? Google WILL penalize it. Stay away from it!

Title Tag Stuffing

The title is what appears in the top left hand corner of your webpage. Webmasters incorrectly stuff their title tag with different versions of their keyphrase. Don’t do it… You only need to include your keyword(s) one time in your title tag.

Anymore than 1 time will only dilute the effect, and if you overdo it, you may get banned.

Those are just a few of the things that people are continuing to do online. These things will eventually get your website banned and WILL NOT help you rank well.

It’s just a waste of time and effort, plus just plain ignorant to waste your time on something that doesn’t work and will get your website banned from the search engines. Unfortunately, over 50% of the websites online are currently employing these incorrect techniques and are dropping out of Google by the handful.

Duplicate Content

You've probably heard about the duplicate content penalty. What is duplicate content? Well, if Google finds multiple web pages have the same content they may penalize each website for this. The truth is that Google and Yahoo are banning websites from their search results in record numbers. Of course, someone may have copied your content and Google banned you even though it was your original content that was taken. If you are not using unique articles for your website or blog but are instead getting your content from PLR packages and article directories, your sites are at risk of getting banned.

Make sure no other site is using your content. You can do this by performing a Google search using some of your text with quotation marks (") around it. If you do find someone is using your original copy visit here to learn more about copyright infringement.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages have been developed to position high for a specific keyword or phrase. Don't try to hide these pages on your site so that surfers should not see. Instead think of every page on your site as a Doorway, or Salesman for your website. These pages aren't in the navigation most of the time. If you come across a page where much of the information is duplicated from other pages on the site but it is different in terms of keywords only, this is most likely a doorway page.

If you sell more than one widget & most do, it is impossible for you to optimize one page to cover all 150 widgets. However, by creating doorway pages you can create entry pages to your site which spotlight on keyword & phrases for their specific widget.

Excessively Redirecting Pages

Sneaky redirection pages are set up in groups from 5 to hundreds. They all target similar and related keywords or phrases. Usually, the only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a false sense of related linking. This is called Cloaking which is an unethical practice of creating different Web pages for search engines and visitors. That is, webmasters create meaningless web pages that are stuffed with highly searched keywords. When the visitors click the link, the site redirects them to a well-written meaningful page but search engine spiders see the meaningless page loaded with keywords and links that has been designed to impress them. These pages don't necessarily contain content that any human would be interested in. These pages may show up high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), but when you click on one of these pages from the SERPS, you will be redirected to another page. In other words, the page you click to see is not the page you actually get to read.

Most engines today repeatedly speak out against cloaking. Nevertheless, the practice continues to thrive, because the engines have traditionally done a poor job of finding and penalizing sites employing this technique. Just because search engines are less effective in detecting cloaking, it doesn't mean you will never be detected. Avoid cloaking and redirects to protect your site from a ban by search engines.

The redirect can be automatic, done with a meta refresh command or through other means such as a the mouse moving while on the redirect page.

Which were only a few of the onpage SEO "no-no's" you should stay far away from.