Are You In Good Books With Google | Don't Get Your Website Penalized Or Banned

This is a question that I ask all Web designers and Web Application Developers that I know - Are you in good books with Google?

Most people say "well yeah" and yet day after day after day I keep seeing people mourning in SEO blogs that their websites that they have invested so much time and money in have been banned by Google and no longer in the index

The funny thing is how most of the webmasters claim to have done nothing wrong and talk about the big Google conspiracy. This lesson is going to teach you a very important thing - Not to get banned by Google while you Optimize your site.

First things first...how to know if you are banned

Some people think that when their website drops in ranking it automatically means that they have been banned by Google. That's far from the truth. The surest way to tell if you are not in the Google index anymore is by taking a look at 2 important things

1. The Google search results.
2. The Google toolbar.

Check Google's search results

Do something real quick for me if you can. Go to Google and enter your web address into Google's search box. In this example we'll use a made up domain name. (www.jjhdfjkgfhit.com).

Click "search"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to Google there is no information available for this web address. This only says one thing  about this particular site. Its no longer in Google's index.

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, the website we entered has been banned by Google for some reason is either banned or is brand new. If we know our website was once in Google and do the search I just showed you above, and Google says "Sorry, no information is available for URL [whatever your URL is]", then chances are... you're banned. Fire your webmaster

You can use the Google Toolbar to show you if your website has been banned. If you don't have the toolbar on your computer.. get it now here

http://toolbar.google.com

Once it's installed, simply visit your website. If the Google toolbar is completely gray, this may mean that you have been banned by Google. Oh oh Fire your Webmaster here as well

Banned:

 

 

not banned

Ok, so now we know how to tell if our website has been banned.

So what makes Google hate your website

There are a lot of things that can make Google dislike your website, both onpage & offpage factors. We are only going to focus on the onpage factors in this lesson.

There are some webmasters that get away with spamming Google but let me assure you one thing - Google is going to catch them and have them for lunch. Don't be tempted to join this crowd as these tricks do nothing except harm your rankings and only waste your time and money.

It's just not worth the risk when doing them no longer helps your ranking to begin with.

Trick #1 : Hidden Text

Hidden Text is simply text that users cannot see when they visit your webpage - but only seen by the search engine spider. Black Hat SEOs do this so that they can add keywords throughout their webpage without it interfering with what the visitors actually see.

The most common example is making your text white (#FFFFFF) on a white background on your web page. If you wanted to hide text, you would simply make the color of your text white.

Here is an example of one spammer on the web who is using hidden text. Have a look below:

You cant see anything wrong with this site right now but wait till you click "ctrl + a" on your keyboard. This will highlight the entire webpage as shown below:

Oh Oh, there is the hidden text at the very top left side of their website that says "fat loss body fat abs weight loss diets bodybuilding dieting tips abdominals"

The crazy guy probably wants to rank highly for these terms 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.

Trick #2 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.

The following is a website that wanted to rank well for "cabbage soup diet". What they've done is inserted a graphic of a cabbage. They've then added an alt image tag to the graphic. When a visitors visits the website, and hovers their mouse over the cabbage soup graphic, a little popup will appear. Oh oh

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. Imagine how a blind person will be tricked by such a web especially if he/she is using a speech enabled browser - it will keep reading cabbage soup "cabbage soup cabbage soup cabbage soup cabbage soup cabbage soup cabbage soup"

Alt image spamming is something you want to stay clear of. Using alt image tags are good, but you can overdo it, as you can see above. A good alt image tag in this case would simply be: cabbage soup diet graphic

Trick #3 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, the following website is trying to rank well for the keyword "batteries".

<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONBATTERY="batteries, BATTERIES, Batteries, batteries batteries battery supplies, batteries, batteries battery, battery, Battery, BATTERIES, batteries, Batteries,batteries, BATTERIES, Batteries, batteries batteries battery supplies, batteries, batteries battery, battery, Battery, BATTERIES, batteries, Batteries, batteries, BATTERIES, Batteries, batteries batteries battery supplies, batteries, batteries battery, battery, Battery, BATTERIES, batteries, Batteries,batteries, BATTERIES, Batteries, batteries batteries battery supplies, batteries, batteries battery, battery, Battery, BATTERIES, batteries, Batteries batteries, BATTERIES, Batteries, batteries batteries battery supplies, batteries, batteries battery, battery, Battery, BATTERIES, batteries, Batteries">

This is obviously ridiculous. Google, and other search engines no longer use Meta Tags to rank websites. Silly

Google WILL penalize it, and it WILL NOT help you... so, why would anyone do something like this?

Stay away from it.

Those are just a few of the things that people are continuing to do online. These things WILL eventually get your website banned or penalized and WILL NOT help you rank well. It's just a waste of time and effort, plus it's just plain ignorant to waste your time on something that doesn't work and will get your website banned from the search engines anyway.