TOP 4 Ways to Get A Google Ban!

August 22, 2008

Search engine optimisation is not about getting websites banned i know! but if you know how to get a site banned then you would have a good understanding of how not to get a website banned. Many web designers and developers not always no or believe in SEO. Somethings are done for cosmetic purposes and others to try and gain rankings. Being able to spot potential problems with a website can save a lot of time in the long run. One of the main obstacles can sometimes be the owners of websites who find it hard to understand why their spammy methods need to be removed because they have worked well so far and nothing has happened. I always say its better to be safe than sorry 6 months down the line. Once a website has undergone optimisation then they sit pretty at the top of Google and they are putting themselfs in the fireing line for more scrutinising from competition and from Google themselfs as they up their crawl rate. Remember Google Webmaster tools has a facility to report websites that have gained rankings through spamming google so its not hard for Joe public to report you.

the following are some sure fire ways to get google hot on your tail implementing either complete Ban’s or filtering you from the results.

1) Cloaking, This is something that on the whole you don’t do by mistake, because of this it is taken very seriously and will get banned! Cloaking is when you serve different content to google when they spider your site than you do to a human user when they navigate to your site. The main method to detect this is to use a user agent switcher. this means you can browse the Internet as though you are google. The second way is to simply view the cache of a page in google to see if it is the same.

2) Hidden Text and or Links. This is a very common spam technique to come across. This is the practice of placing text or links on a page that are not seen by a human user but will be seen when google crawls your page. Common ways to do this is to hide all the content using CSS. You could place then in a div and apply display:none you could colour the text the same as the background so it cant be seen, you could also postition it absoloute and place a Z index of -1 so it is below and covered by all other elements on the page.

However you do it it will get you a ban most probably because again, you don’t often come across this happening by accident.

3) Duplicate content! We all know that content is king, Duplicate content is the court Jester! Duplicating your content throughout your site will not get you banned by google but its not a very wise move. Duplicating your whole website with multiple domains is an even worse idea, If having multiple domains gave you a better chance in SEO all we would need to do is advice our clients to purchase 100 domains and they could flood the first page with the same website.

4) Doorway Pages. Similar to cloaking but using a slightly different method. A doorway page is an optimised page used for gaining rankings which redirects as soon as the user loads the page. The doorway page will typically be full of spam but a meta refresh will occurre as soon as the page loads and forward the user to the main website, Google can not follow Meta refreshes so never sees the main site.

This however would be a stupid way to spam though, not only would you get banned but you would also not have any of your pages cached unless you had a site map that google could follow as if it entered your homepage it would get stuck at the doorway page.

If you don’t follow these methods accurately then you will be successful in not being filtered or banned in google.

Gary
NSEO Programmer