Marketing Defined

How Not To Get Your Website Banned By Google

It’s a simple question… Are you asking Google to penalize or ban your website?

You’re probably thinking; Well, of course not! Yet daily I see new people complaining in expert SEO forums that their websites have been banned by Google and they “have no idea why”.

These people claim they’ve done nothing wrong and appear clueless as to why their site is no longer in Google. The purpose of this lesson is to teach you one VERY important thing.

What NOT to do when optimizing your onpage ranking factors

How do you know if you’ve been banned?

First let me show you how to see if you’re clearly banned by Google. Often times people think they’ve been banned, when in reality they’ve just dropped in ranking and can’t find their website.

There are a couple of things you can do.

1. Check Google’s search results.

Go to Google and enter your entire URL into Google’s search box. In this example we’ll use a made up name (www.jkhljkhkjh.com) and click “search”.

You will notice that Google says there is no information available for this URL? This means that the URL is no longer in Google’s database.

If you enter a brand new website into Google, you’ll always get this message until the website has been indexed.  But in this case, our website has been banned by Google for some reason.

Another way you can quickly see if your website has been banned is by:

2. View the Google Toolbar.

Download the Google Toolbar here: http://toolbar.google.com

Once it’s installed, simply visit your website. If the Google toolbar is completely gray and shows no page rank, this means you have been *banned by Google.

* Note: Most SEMs incorrectly call this “gray barred”. Not “banned” as it should be. Ok, so now we know how to tell if our website has been banned.

Expert Onpage Ranking Factors To Avoid A Website Ban from Google

There are many onpage ranking factors AND offpage ranking factors that can cause Google to ban your website.

Today, we’ll focus on only the onpage factors that can cause your site to get banned.

Before I begin, I want you to know that many websites still get away for a short while with doing some of these things. They DO NOT help your rankings and are simply a waste of time, so don’t try them.

Sooner or later Google will catch up to these websites and will remove them. It’s just not worth the risk, when doing them doesn’t help your ranking to begin with.

Hidden Text

Hidden Text is simply text that users can’t see when they visit your web page. Some webmasters will do this so that they can add keywords throughout their web page without it interfering with what the visitors actually see. Yet, the search engines can still see hidden text.

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 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.

If you go to Google and enter “fat loss”, the website that currently ranks #1, uses this method. However, this is not the reason they rank first, and do not need to employ such methods.

They rank well because of their excellent onpage ranking factors. If they were to remove this hidden text, they would continue to rank #1 and would not have the potential of getting banned by Google.

Alt image 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 “cabbage soup diet” has inserted a graphic of a cabbage.

They’ve then added an alt image tag to the graphic.

When a visitors visits the website, hovers their mouse over the cabbage soup graphic, a little popup will appear repeating the keyphrase “cabbage soup diet, cabbage soup, cabbage soup dieting, cabbage, soup, soup cabbage diet”

Notice how many times they’ve repeated the word “cabbage soup” and “cabbage”? 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 practise, but you can overdo it as you can clearly see above.

A good alt image tag in this case would simply be: cabbage soup diet graphic

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 “tents” and uses this keyword meta tag:

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.

My thanks to Brad Callen who has granted permission for us to reference portions of his SEO Made Easy tutorial, which together with his SEO Elite software is greatly responsible for the many top10 SE rankings the Marketing Defined blog has enjoyed to date.

The free SEO Made Easy ebook is highly recommended reading, particularly for newcomers to SEO and online website marketing and small business owners [the target market for whom this Blog is written].

Go ahead and download the free, expert SEO tips and strategies course right now: SEO MADE EASY — you are welcome to pass on this ebook, but if you choose to offer it as a download from your website, it is essential you upload a copy to your own web server and link to it from there.

FYI, togther with the application of expert “offpage optimization” techniques, you will most likely find that your posts are indexed and probably at a healthy search engine ranking within 48 hours of publishing, if you use only current, legitimate and expert SEO tips such as those contained in the above Post and the free download - SEO Made Easy ebook .