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The 7 Deadly Sins Guaranteed to Get Your Website Banned!
Brothers and sisters I have sinned! I have been a sinner! I didn't know I was sinning but the great Search Engine Spirits didn't care. Don't let this happen to you!
In reality, I didn't commit all Seven of the Deadly Sins, but you don't need to commit more than one to get banned.
The First Deadly Sin - Don't Hide Text
When I first started one of my websites, I used a template from a large template company. There was nothing wrong with it. I just didn't have everything in place to put into some of the Read More >> links and I didn't have links for some of the menu buttons but knew that eventually I would use.
What I did was change the text to the same color as the background. I figured I would save myself time in the future by having the links available and keep the same page formatting by doing this. In reality, I didn't have any "keywords" there and in no way was trying to stuff the pages with keywords.
The Search Engine Spirits are pretty smart. I think there is a lot of artificial intelligence there, but the search engines are also programmed to look for hidden text because of some of the tricks that "Black Hat" SEO companies have used in the past.
I wasn't getting any visitors and I wondered why. I also wasn't using any SEO tools so I didn't have a clue as to what was going on until one day I happened to visit Google's site and started reading the section on Google information for Webmasters where they said "Avoid hidden text or hidden links." I went "Hoh Boy!" Needless to say I started learning about search engine optimization (SEO). (As a side bar, since that time I have made SEO a kind of avocation and now make SEO tools available for everyone at another site I have http://www.digitalpagesinc.com/search_engine_optimization.html .)
I went back and got rid of any hidden text and now am visited regularly by the search engines.
The Second Deadly Sin - Don't Have Links to Nowhere or Employ Cloaking or Sneaky Redirects
As a result of my having "holding areas" on my website so that I could fill in the blanks later, I had links to nowhere which meant that the search engines where going to become confused and probably not index the pages. While that probably wasn't a Deadly Sin, some of the Black Hats try to fake out the search engines by setting up link structures where they show the search engines one thing and visitors something else. This is part a ranking strategy that may get the pages high rankings for a little while, but it eventually gets found out and then the site goes to search engine Hades.
Along with this go redirects which are set up to send competitors or search engines to another page or worse, sending a visitor to a site they never intended to visit. Have you ever gotten into a page trap? You know what I mean then. There used to be a site called Whitehouse.com which was a bad site and you couldn't get out of it. If you closed your page another one would pop up. The correct address for the Whitehouse is Whitehouse.gov. Lots of people made that mistake including me.
The Third Deadly Sin - Don't Have Duplicate Content on Your Website
This is a tricky one because it depends on how much duplicate content you have. You can have a few phrases here and there that are the same and you can have duplicate content as other sites. If you couldn't, news sites couldn't exist. Copyright law is another issue altogether.
What the search engines are looking out for is multiple pages or multiple domains or multiple subdomains with essentially duplicate content. These pages or domains are set up to try to optimize on keywords in a lazy manner. If you do this you are going to get banned.
The Fourth Deadly Sin - Don't Spam Keywords
This is one of the mistakes that new site owners make when doing DYI search engine optimization. They know from reading various publications that keywords are extremely important to getting placed by search engines. They then try to stuff their keywords into their web page as many times as they can.
Additionally, before the search engines became more sophisticated, the SEOs used to put in keywords over and over again to get the attention of search engines and fake them out as to the importance of the page.
In order to overcome this, search engines changed their algorithms to look for too many keywords in places they didn't seem to belong and identified them as spam. The search engines then began to reduce the importance of or ban the pages.
There is a rule of thumb that when putting keyword into your keyword <alt> tags; don't repeat them more than three times. I've seen sites with keywords repeated in their keyword <alt> tags several times without penalty. Its up to you to determine how many times to do it, but until you really know what you are doing, conservative is safer than overly aggressive.
The real rule to follow is if your page reads smoothly and adds value to the visitor, you should be O.K.
The Fifth Deadly Sin - Don't Use Link Farms
Link Farms are sites that are set up just link sites to each other on a free for all basis on the theory that it's a quick and dirty way to get links to your site. The SEs love links to your site and consider your page more important on the theory that linking to you means that your site must be good.
What the SEs are looking for is "natural" links. They hate link farms. If they see that you are using link farms, they "know" that you are trying to manipulate them and they will punish you for using such obvious disrespect for them.
If you think of search engines as very proud individuals who want respect, you will be much better off. I know that the engines are not really sentient beings, but if you pretend that they are and treat them as such, you won't be as likely to get into trouble.
The Sixth Deadly Sin - Don't Make Text Too Small
This is very similar to the Don't Hide Text Rule. Again, the search engines don't want you writing just to manipulate them and don't want you stuffing keywords. By making text too small, they think you are trying to do this.
Think about it. If you are making text too small, are you really writing for people?
The Seventh Deadly Sin - Don't Use Doorway Pages
Don't use Doorway Pages designed specifically for search engines or cookie cutter pages. The Search engines will punish you for it. A good article about Doorway Pages has been written by the guru Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167831 .
Google specifically cautions against such pages.
Well bothers and sisters, you now know the Seven Deadly Sins. You can now choose - be a sinner or be a winner.
About the Author
Dan Foley is CEO of digitalpages http://www.digitalpagesinc.com, a website design, development and SEO company located in Minneapolis, MN. Dan can be reached at dfoley@digitalpagesinc.com or 952-456-1514.