How to Avoid being Penalized by Google
by Frank Jovine on 07/12/2009 in Google
Practicing “white hat” SEO will prevent your website from being penalized by Google. So what is White Hat SEO? White Hat SEO methods are the approved, natural ways of building traffic to your website which are well document in The Google Webmaster Guidelines. These techniques follow the rules and regulation of search engines.
How to avoid being penalized by Google, consider these suggestions
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t send automated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- Avoid bad neighbors – These are sites linking to your site that are categorized as malicious and or spam websites.
This list is considered SEO “blackhat” and should be avoided. There are other ways to achieve a Google penalty, like buying and inter-linking on too many domains and listing your keywords repeatedly.
How can I tell if I’ve been penalized by Google?
If you notice that your Google PR went down (example: PR4 to PR2), this does not mean you are being penalized by Google. Your ranking for a keyword depends on many factors, including how many others are competing for the same keyword, how much content exists for that keyword and incoming links also known as backlinks. Search engines like Google, are constantly updating their algorithms that determine rank, and as these change, ranks do as well. I’ve noticed sites that I visit often that temporarily are no longer indexed in Google, but return later for no obvious reason, so don’t be too quick to blame a Google penalty when your pageranks are going downward.
How to tell if your site is still in Google’s index
Simply search for the url (“mysite.com”). If there is no information returned, the url is not indexed. You can also see all pages that have been indexed by searching for “site:mysite.com” If you were ranking before, but show nothing for this search, you have a Google penalty.
What can you do if you have incurred a penalty?
First off, you need to make the necessary corrections that your blog or websites need. Once you finish all the necessary changes, send a request for reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools or contacting Google support at http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/request.py?
David Hopkins
Jul 12th, 2009
I am currently dealing with someone who is in the penalty box. Before I came into contact with them, their site had the noindex,nofollow meta on it for about 4-5 months. Since removing it, the site still won’t come up for any unique text to the site. That is another penalty mark I’ve noticed – not coming up for queries even when the text is unique to the site unless you add the [site:] operator.
In my experience sometimes Google lift the penalty of their own accord; so I sometimes wait before cracking out the re-inclusion request.
Frank J
Jul 12th, 2009
David,
Is there a robots.txt file in the root directory? If so, I would check to see if it has the disallow for the entire site. If not, try submitting the site to a few social bookmarks. This will speed up the process for indexing.
David Hopkins
Jul 12th, 2009
I tried loading the robots.txt and there is nothing there, unless its been cloacked. I’ve not got access to the server so can’t see if there really is one. I also did the spider crawl test in G Webmaster Tools, which worked.
The site is fully indexed in Google (witch cache), but it won’t come up unless you use the [site:] command. You can Google unique sentences off the site and it won’t come up until you append [site:domain.ext]. I have seen this happen once before on a new site, so for now I suggested just leaving it.
One thing someone has suggested to me is that it is because all the product descriptions are duplicate. I’ve heard of new sites allegedly penalised for this on forums, but not seen it first hand.
Frank J
Jul 12th, 2009
David,
Duplicate content can hurt the site as indicated in my blog post. Having a deviation can help. I recommend that the content be changed.
Kikolani
Jul 12th, 2009
What about automatic queries by sites that check SERP, like the Rank Checker by SEOBook.com? Those aren’t the kind of queries they are talking about, right?
~ Kristi
Frank J
Jul 12th, 2009
Kristi,
That’s not the queries that I am talking about. Those queries are fine and you have nothing to worry about.
David Hopkins
Jul 12th, 2009
Before my site is what it was now it had a Google rank checker on it, which is against the TOS and I got whacked for it. However other people like SEOMoz were allowed to continue without penalty. I guess I was hit because I was the little guy
Not long after that Google put a cap on search and PR queries.
Frank J
Jul 12th, 2009
David,
I am not sure if the little guys get hurt as Google Webmaster Guidelines applies to everyone, even SEOMoz.
Katie Baird
Jul 12th, 2009
I have been 90% de-indexed by Google twice. Google knew before I did that I had cloaked links, the result of sql injection or some other means of hikacking my site.
Keeping track of your SERPs is important for lots of reasons. In both if these instances, my SERP drop was my first hint that someone had compromised my site.
As soon as I found the bad code and removed it, I submitted requests for reconsideration to Google and got my SERPS back promptly. PR was never affected, just as you pointed out.
Frank J
Jul 12th, 2009
Katie,
We published an article on sql injections that were happening on WordPress blogs. It’s very important to know how well you are showing up in the SERP. I use 3 keywords that I check each week to see if there are any negative changes.
BunnygotBlog
Jul 12th, 2009
I did the check with four words and my blog did come up first but then another blog with a similar name came up several times on the first page.
So I am not sure about that being so good or is it?
BunnygotBlog
Jul 12th, 2009
Frank- what hidden links are you talking about? I have been using pictures with links in them.
Or do you mean the actual coding if the blog site itself?
Frank J
Jul 12th, 2009
Bunny, Just like hidden text matching the background color, links can be hidden the same way my masking the hyperlink.
Tamal Anwar
Jul 12th, 2009
The part where you said PR 4 to PR 2, most of the time people think their site has been banned by google and they got a low PR.
Paid content and text link ad was once the reason for google penalty but now google seems to be okay with them. Even google search shows you have 100’s of pages indexed; you can see the real picture in the new webmaster tools. It will say, 100 pages submitted and 80 pages indexed.
madhollywood
Jul 13th, 2009
I have had some really weird issues with my brother’s site which makes me think he has a google issue, but maybe I am just paranoid.
Within the first two months or so of regularly updating content on his site he started showing up strongly for a few different keywords. He was number one for his name “Jason Zuckerman”, number 3 for the term “Sketch of the Day”, and had several other strong SERP’s. All of a sudden the organic search traffic which had been building dropped off the face of the earth.
His site was still indexed by google, but after several weeks of no recovery in his SERP’s I submitted a reinclusion request out of frustration. Not sure really if that was the right thing to do in retrospect.
I saw a modest improvement after several weeks, but certain SERP’s never recovered. Even on his name right now he comes in second to a site of lower page rank and as far as I can tell comparable keyword density for his name. He also has his full name in the url which should be an advantage I had thought. Occassionally, I will see him at number 1, but more often he is second.
I also observe a yo-yo on “jay zuck” from as high as one to as low as the mid 40’s. If you search “jay zuck” you will get almost exclusive references to his site which I think is odd for a site ranking in the 40’s often for that very term.
The other odd thing is that google images traffic has increased over the months and continues to grow even while the general search remains low. It is a real brain scratcher for me, but I put it to you if you have any perspective on this.
Finally, on Yahoo he comes up 3 on “Sketch of the Day” and 1 for his name and “jay zuck” which has the net result of me feeling mocked by google.
I wish I was a regular of this site ages ago and had read an article just like this. Great and sobering stuff on the dreaded google penalty.
CrimeCleaner
Jul 13th, 2009
Some good advise here. One thing to thing about is that Google is going through some serious changes right now. I am seeing a lot of very similar questions across the web. I thinks its time to be patient and see what happens with Google in the next few months..
Andrew - Camping Ljubljana
Jul 13th, 2009
“Avoid bad neighbors – These are sites linking to your site that are categorized as malicious and or spam websites.”
I always wondered if black hat SEO’s use that as a tool to fight competitive sites? Anyone can put up a spam site and link from there to a competitive site. And Google can’t know!
Kikolani
Jul 15th, 2009
Say some guy writes a adsense spam blog about online pharmacies, and happens to like your SEO blog, so he adds it to his blogroll. How is that your fault? Of the black hats that probably are resorting to putting competitor site links in bad neighborhoods. I think bad neighborhood links shouldn’t count as a vote for your site, but it shouldn’t count as one against it either, since you have no control over who is linking to you. If it’s not happening already, this can be taken advantage of where someone could create a bad neighborhood and make people pay to get their link out of it.
~ Kristi
Frank J
Jul 15th, 2009
Kristi,
Bad neighbor is the reverse, you linking to them and the site is malicious. It’s important to review your comments and the links that each commenter is providing. There’s no way you would get penalized because some malicious site adds your link, that would hurt all sites.
Stas
Jul 19th, 2009
Thank You very much for nice advice! I am sorry, that I read it to late- 3 days ago I have been penalized by google. I think that I checked and fixed everything.
I have one question- can removing and re including content to solve google penalty?