How to Get Blacklisted
Blacklisting by search engines is increasingly appearing in the news, as shown by this article in the Wall Street Journal. As the article points out, you must be very careful in selecting an SEO service provider, as many employ shady methods which are sure to catch up to them and more importantly, to your site. To understand more about banned practices, continue reading below.
8 Proven Methods for Getting Black Listed by Search Engines
In the early days of search engine indexing, engines relied on information that people provided about their sites to develop the index. Keywords included in metatags and during the submission process were passed along to the index without evaluation of whether or not they really applied to the site's purpose and content. This meant that hapless searchers might look for "cheap Alaska cruise" and end up on a porn site. Wily site promoters developed all sorts of tricks to help get search results high up in the list, such as use of invisible text, doorway pages, excessive keyword repetition, and page cloaking.
As search engine technology evolves, indexing has become increasingly sophisticated in an attempt to determine a site's true content and relevancy to particular keyword searches. Engines now look for the presence of spamming tricks (sometimes referred to as “spamdexing”) and penalize sites which employ them. Depending on the severity and type of infractions, you may find your site blacklisted, or in the case of directories with human editors (such as the Open Directory Project) not accepted for listing at all.
This document outlines 8 surefire ways to get your site ignored (or worse) by search engines.
Invisible or Hidden Text
In an attempt to increase keyword density, webmasters began adding invisible text (meaning text that is the same color as the background, or very tiny text). This technique worked for a while, however today's search engines ignore or penalize such pages.
Unfortunately, even ethically produced websites using good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies can find themselves penalized for hidden text. For example, your site could have a white background and include a green table with white text. While the text is actually visible, the engine may not recognize the existence of the table color.
As a BizWonk SEO client, one of our initial tasks would be to use tools to identify the presence of any invisible text on your site so that it can be corrected, even if you don't realize it's there.
Keyword Spamming
Another mechanism used in an attempt to increase keyword density is to cram keywords in allowable areas. For example, you may have seen site titles and descriptions which are just a long list of keywords rather than useful phrases. Sometimes the same word is repeated multiple times. Another spam technique is to include keywords that you think people will be interested in (such as a celebrity name or a hot current event phrase), even though the words having nothing to do with your site. Today’s s earch engines recognize such tactics as a substitute for quality content, and an attempt to trick the spiders into good positioning. As you can imagine, they don't like that.
BizWonk’s SEO clients are guided in how to effectively saturate sites with targeted keywords in order to indicate relevancy to spiders and achieve good positioning.
Improper Submission
As with link spamming, you’ve probably seen email ads offering to submit your site to 3,000 engines for $9.95 per month. While submission was very important in the early days of search engine indexing, when there was a strong reliance on using information provided as part of the submission process, today’s spidering methods offer a very different picture.
The accepted understanding is that 90% of search traffic comes from a handful of major U.S. search engines and directories. With industry consolidation, the true number shrinks all the time. Most of the thousands of minor engines use the databases of major engines, which means that you don’t really need to submit to them.
If you are targeting specific geographic markets, you might want to submit your site to the most popular regional search engines in those countries, but most people worldwide continue to use the U.S. versions of search engines such as Yahoo and AltaVista despite the fact that there are local versions available. If you get your site listed on the most popular search engines and directories, you will have the major worldwide traffic sources covered.
The issue goes deeper than merely whether or not you really need to submit. Many companies believe they need to submit systematically and repeatedly, which isn’t true. Once the major engines know you exist, your site will be on their spiders’ periodic revisit and re-indexing schedule. The only time you need to resubmit your site is if the URL changes or if your domain suddenly drops out of an engine’s database entirely.
Sophisticated engines (like Google) consider repeated submissions spamdexing and may ban you. They also hate software which automatically submits.
Submission performed by BizWonk is very selective, and is based on the specific needs of individual clients. Submission to major engines is manual, but in some cases automatic submission is used for smaller engines. Selection of industry or geography specific engines can also be a useful service, for cases when unique engines are used by targeted populations.
Artificial Linking
The most important factor in Google's ranking algorithm is link popularity. Their logic is that if high ranking sites with good topic relevancy and content link to your site, it’s probably pretty decent as well.
You've probably received spam mail offering to link your site from thousands of other sites. These opportunities are known as Free For All (FFA) sites or “link farms”. Sites which exist for no other reason than to include hundreds or thousands of links are a search engine no-no.
Another artificial linking method is to develop a bunch of sites and then link between them, purely with the goal of increasing the number of links to the primary site. Sophisticated search engines detect if two websites artificially link to each other and will demote ranking as a result.
A key service offered in some BizWonk SEO packages is to develop linking campaigns which target well-ranked sites, having related content. This effort has long term payoffs not only in engine ranking, but in providing users with direct opportunities to find you even if they are not actively searching.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are keyword-focused pages that link to your main web site. They are designed to score well on search engines, and then act as a bridge between traffic from the engines and your main site or order page. Search engines view doorway as spamdexing, because some dishonest webmasters create basic, template doorway pages and fill them with keywords, redirecting visitors from them to the main site. You can even buy software that automatically churns out doorway pages, but please don’t! Sophisticated engines like Google have stated that they will penalize sites which use automatically generated doorway pages.
As a BizWonk SEO client, you will be advised about how to achieve your traffic goals without using techniques like doorway pages, or by developing doorway pages which don't break the rules.
Page Cloaking
Page cloaking is a technique used to deliver different web pages depending on the circumstances. The two most common reasons for cloaking are:
- To hide the source code from competitors.
- To prevent visitors from seeing pages written specifically for spiders.
Cloaking prevents search engines from being able to spider the page a real user sees, which impacts the spider from evaluating relevance and usefulness.
As with doorway pages, BizWonk can help you determine whether or not other methods for achieving your goals are available.
Broken Links, Incomplete Construction, and Other Errors
Some engines along with the most important directories (Yahoo and Open Directory Project for example) use human editors to review site submissions. These editors have prescribed guidelines to follow, and have high standards. This means that your site should be in very good shape before submission to them, so that they don't find broken links, “under construction” pages, or other errors. If they do find problems like that, they may decide that the site isn't ready for inclusion.
One of BizWonk’s initial tasks in assisting SEO clients is to run checks to determine if and where these problems exist, so that they can be eliminated prior to submission.
Duplicate Content
When search engines encounter a website that has content which is the same as another site, they may interpret it as a spam technique. Even if they don't blacklist your site for having duplicate content, there is not much point in indexing the page if it delivers exactly the same results as another site already delivers. If you want to have multiple sites for a single business, you need to make sure the content for each one is unique.
Conclusion
As search engine technology continues to evolve, acceptable SEO practices will continue to change. What's OK to do today may be a ban-worthy practice tomorrow. Keeping up with changing standards and best practices takes time and energy away from your core business, which in today's competitive environment, just doesn't make sense. That’s why you should turn to BizWonk for help; we tune in to what's happening so that we can keep your site out of the black lists, and achieve good rankings.