Help, my site has been banned by Google! Part 2

What Google considers unacceptable spam

Your site has been banned by Google and your search engine listings have disappeared. Let us try to find out what you have done wrong.

And remember, search engines like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves/Teoma and the forthcoming MSN search engine more or less agree with Google as regards what constitutes spam.

Part 1 | 2 | 3

Avoid hidden text

Hidden text is an old timer in the history of search engine optimization. In the early jurassic period -- i.e. in the mid 1990's -- webmasters discovered that search engines rewarded web pages with a lot of occurrences of relevant keyword phrases.

Hence they would repeat the keywords again and again, hiding the text by giving the text the same color as the web page background. The search engine spiders would read the text, the human visitors would not.

Needless to say, you should avoid such tricks. The search engine spiders will compare the font color with the background color if you use old fashioned HTML.

To find hidden text you could either look at the HTML code itself (View Source) or mark the whole web page with your mouse. This will make hidden text stand out.

CSS-savvy coders may try to get around this by including the colors in their style sheets. We have no proof that the search engine check the style sheets for color codes, but be sure that your competitors will do so -- and they will report you to Google if they find out.

The same applies if you use one CSS layer to cover another.

If you use regular HTML, be careful when you enter colored text in colored table cells. Google will compare the text color with the regular web page color, not the color of the table cell. Hence white text in a black table cell on a white web page will look like white on white to a search engine -- and they may consider it spam.

Avoid hidden links

Many webmasters turn out so called "doorway pages" designed specifically for the search engines (we'll say more about them later on).

These webmasters would prefer that regular visitors who come to the site via the main entrance -- the home page -- do not find these pages, as they do not reflect well upon the quality of the site as a whole.

However, the web master must include links for the search engine to follow in order for these pages to be indexed. Hence the need for hidden links. Hidden links can also be used to interlink web sites in order to enhance link popularity.

There are several ways of coding hidden links. One way is to put in a transparent 1 x 1 pixel picture file and then turn this image into a link using the A HREF syntax.

Here's an example:

<a href="http://mysite.com/doorwaypage.html"><img src="../graphics/blackdot.gif" width="1" height="1" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" alt="Relevant keywords"></a>

Another way to do this is to make a single dot (.) into a link, including the relevant keyword phrases in the ALT parameter.

If you find such links on your website, remove them immediately.

Don't employ cloaking.

Cloaking is a very popular technique among search engine optimization experts who have a more than a little knowledge about servers and obscure programming languages.

It is possible to distinguish a search engine spider from a regular human visitors. Hence these experts develop scripts that sniff out the search engine spiders in order to deliver them highly optimized web pages.

Regular visitors get different unoptimized web pages.

In the best case scenario there is a relationship between the page the spider reads and the one you are served. In the worst case scenario, the cloaked page tells the search engine about children playing, while the real one is about adults "playing".

If you have never heard of cloaking, ask your computer expert or search engine optimization company if they have.

Avoid sneaky redirects

There are more primitive -- and inefficient -- ways of hiding a regular web pages from the search engines. One is redirects.

The following code embedded in the web page will tell the web browser to open a new page (hiddenpage.html) in the browser window within 0 (zero) seconds:

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://mysite.com/hiddenpage.html">

The page with the redirect code will be optimized for the search engines, the hidden page is probably not.

Google and the other search engine find such code highly suspicious. If you need to use a redirect meta tag, include a NONINDEX tag as well. By using that tag you tell the search engine not to include the page in the index, thus avoiding suspicion:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX">

By the way: the best way of doing redirects -- for instance if you have moved a page permanently -- is by doing a 301 redirect through changing the server's .htaccess file.

As Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs has pointed out, 301s are also the best way of redirecting traffic from one domain to another, i.e. if you have several domain names pointing to the same site.

Taming the Beast has more on 301 redirects.

A new way of hiding the content of optimized web pages is to include the whole page in a javascript mouseover command. If you do not know how this is done, we are not going to tell you.

However, you will see if this technique has been used if you put your mouse cursor outside the web page itself when the page is loading. You will then see the "real" page that is hidden when the mouse cursor is within the browser window.

Don't send automated queries to Google

Google says:

"Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."

Well, we have never heard of anyone who have been banned by Google for using such tools with common sense. But if you keep checking all your pages for a large number of keywords every day, Google will probably notice.

Hence: if you do use such programs (and that makes sense if you have a few sites) do not go over board! Check your search engine rankings no more than once a week, or even less often for your not that important pages.

Google will seldom visit a page more than once a month unless it is updated regularly.

Don't load pages with irrelevant words.

If your page is about lawn movers, do not repeat the name of Britney Spears a dozen times throughout the text. The search engines won't like it, your visitors won't like it and Britney Spears won't like it.

(And no, Google will probably not punish us for including the name Britney Spears three times on this page. Hmmm, maybe her fans are interested in search engine optimization?)

But do include relevant words, in the regular text, in the TITLE-tag and elsewhere as described in the Pandia Search Engine Marketing 101 tutorial.

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

This is where some search engine optimization companies gets to excited, as these are techniques that tend to give results fast, i.e. before Google discovers what's taking place and decide to ban the whole site.

At the "Cleaning Up The Mess" session of the latest Search Engine Strategies conference Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink mentioned quite a few practices that can get you banned, including.

• Multiple domains that are established to bring traffic to your site.
• Pages on other domains that are established to redirect traffic to your site.
• Mirror sites, i.e. exact copies of the same site on different domains.
• Multiple Google results (i.e. too many pages in the search engine results pointing to your site or to pages that redirect searchers to your site).

If you have been using a search engine marketing company, make sure that they haven't established such domains and doorway pages pointing to your site.

Google also frown upon links from so-called free for all directories, i.e. sites that are established only to deliver inbound links to sites for a certain price or for a link back.

Go to part 3 of our "Banned by Google" article >>>

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