How to avoid being penalized or banned by search engines.

Saturday, 18 September 2010 18:21

How to avoid being penalized or banned by search engines.

It is a mission of every website to get higher rankings in the search engines. Some people are optimizing their websites with the help of unethical and dishonest practices. Such practices help them to get good position in the search engines only for a short duration and they soon get banned or penalized as search engine spiders smell them easily. Such practices are called Black Hat Search Engine Optimization.

Black Hat SEO techniques or practices are against the rules and regulations of the search engines. Search engines don’t like their existence due to their unethical practices, pitiable experience with the customer and unethical and poor quality content of the website.

Websites following such practices either get banned or penalized. These two are different penalties from each other. Being penalized means your search engines reduce your ranking due to some unethical practice. And being banned means that due to some unethical techniques and tactics, search engines throw you out from the search index.

There are many unethical tactics which are known as Black Hat SEO tactics or Gray Hat SEO. Here are some things which you need to avoid if you want to get higher rankings in the search engine.

Doorway Pages

These are the WebPages that contain content which is invisible for the viewers. It is basically a counterfeit page that visitors can’t see. These pages are only used to trap the search engine spiders to get well positioned in the search engines.

Duplicate Content

This technique uses duplicate content on several pages. Search engine spiders find this duplicate content thus creating a greater risk for your website. Always use unique and original content.

Keyword Stuffing

It is a technique of filling WebPages with keywords to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Although, it is an effective technique to achieve rankings rapidly but it is considered as unethical SEO tactic and websites using these techniques get penalized.

Linking to bad sites

When you are linking to other websites, you should be very cautious.  Avoid linking to websites that are not relevant to your niche. Avoid linking to websites using black hat techniques or fake, unrelated websites.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a practice of creating different content for visitors and different for search engines to get good position. It means presenting an entirely different page to a visitor and different page to a search engines. This also leads a website to be penalized.

Hidden Links

This practice occurs when link is added to a page and visitors can’t see the link. But search engine spiders find out these hidden links, penalize them and website cannot remain any longer in the search directory.

Invisible Text

It is another way of attracting search engine spiders. These are created by using hidden css property. These are created with the same color of the background so that visitors won’t be able to read those texts. Search engines don’t like this tactic and direct your website to ban.

If you really want to retain in the SEO industry and want to achieve higher rankings in the search engines, than avoid using all of these above black hat techniques or you’ll be wasting your money, efforts and the most precious thing called time.