Avoid Being Penalized by Search Engines

by on 08/04/2008 in SEO Tips

Don’t submit your website to any fraudulent backlink methods. You may need to review the page source code to find any wrongful doing.

  • Link farms – 100 or more unrelated links on a page (banned by search engines and also your site if you link to it).
  • Free for All Links – they allow anyone to post a link that’s not moderated, which can result in unrelated and spammy links that could ban your site with search engines.
  • Avoid pages with links inside of frames (this could hurt your Google PR).
  • Bad Sites – Adult related, gambling or drug sites are mostly banned by search engines and can also get your site banned if you link to it.
  • NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW – If the page you would like to place your link on has a robots meta tag that says: “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” or a robots.txt that disallows googlebot then Google will not follow any links on that page.
  • Too many Ads – Watch out for sites that lack content, but are loaded with ads. It’s easy to hide links on a page loaded with ads. These sites often get banned.
  • No PR – The site has a PR of 0 either because the website is new or penalized. Be careful and do your homework! Look for quality sites within your niche.
  • Mirror Sites – Watch out for mirrored sites with the exact same web links (also banned).
  • Database Sites – If the site is a directory, are the links in a dynamically driven database? If so, it will never be found by Search Engines).
  • Robot.txt – Always check a web sites robot.txt to ensure it’s not blocking search engines from following the page. You can check this by entering www.thedomainname.com/robots.txt. If you see “Disallow” in the robot.txt file, than the site is instructing the search engines not to follow the links on that page.

    • Be smart when allowing a site to add a link to your site. Do your research and follow the tips above.

8 Responses to “Avoid Being Penalized by Search Engines”

  1. Better Interpersonal Communication

    Aug 4th, 2008

    Nice tips that all bloggers should follow, or at least know of…

  2. Frank J

    Aug 4th, 2008

    Follow these tips and avoid being penalized by SERPS.

    Thank you for the comment.

  3. Mar Matthias Darin

    Aug 4th, 2008

    Hello,

    This is an excellent post ad the point you mention are spot on. I do know of a couple of exceptions that can sometimes take place.

    First, iframes can be used if they are used properly and there is no questionability about the intent of using it. For example, BlogUpp uses iframes and does very well with its PR.

    Second, dynamic content can be good as well as long as the content is planned as accurately as a standard web page and has all the headers. You also need to explicity list it in your robots.txt

    Also, Google seeems to be changing the way it ranks PR0. PR0 is now a ligitimate rank and a page of no rank is left unranked.

  4. Jennifer

    Aug 5th, 2008

    Wow, this posting scared me a little. I always try to only post links on credible sites, but when posting to directories, I always assumed that if one of them wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, the worst that would happen is it would be a wasted link. I never thought it could lead to being penalized. I guess I’ll really have to be careful and look things over thoroughly.

    Although, as to commenting on a blog that has no PR yet or is noFollow, there could still be other benefits such as gaining the blog owner and other readers of that blog as fans.

  5. Jessica Gottlieb

    Aug 5th, 2008

    Okay, quick question, what happens if one of those sites has you in their list of links?

    It’s not like you can email them with a request?

  6. Drunken Dragon

    Aug 7th, 2008

    @Jessica Gottlieb I ever heard Google didn’t punish you if some of those sites have your link in their links. Just don’t linking to them

    @Frank how about dofollow blog. My blog is dofollow but I moderate all comment. It’s bad too?

    Anyway, this is a nice post :)

  7. Frank J

    Aug 7th, 2008

    Do follow can cause issues if you have a lot of links on your main page or any other page. Google could penalize you as they may think your just a link farm.

    I use no-follow throughout my site.

  8. Frank J

    Aug 7th, 2008

    Jessica,

    Email them to remove your link so that you avoid any penalty.