11 Tips to avoid getting penalized by the search engines
by Randall McCarley
November 5th, 2006
In SEO circles most of this is considered common knowledge but for a regular web designer or site owner making sure you follow these tips can make sure you don’t lose traffic to your sites.
1. Read the Webmaster Guidelines and make sure you are following them. Oddly, this won’t guarantee you don’t get penalized, but it sure helps! Google Yahoo! Live (formerly MSN)
2. Stay away from Blackhat techniques. This includes cloaking, using hidden text, keyword stuffing, scraping content, etc. It’s the stuff that tries to game the system instead of working within the above-mentioned guidelines. Blackhat techniques are fine to use if you know what you are doing - and don’t mind if you get caught - but for anything long-term it isn’t worth the risk. Great resources for BH include syndk8 and SEO Black Hat.*
3. Ask for a review. Both SEO Refugee and Cre8asiteforums offer free website reviews from actual professionals. Some of the best in the biz hang out here and they can let you know if your site is in jeopardy.
4. Pay attention to your traffic. Look at your site logs regularly (I suggest at least weekly). If you see a sudden drop something may be up. Don’t panic. Search engines often fluctuate but this can be an indicator of a problem. If your search referrals drop check to see if anyone else is having the same problem.
5. Monitor your site - especially if you allow guests to add content to it. If you have a blog, forum or other type of website that allows viewers to submit information you must have some kind of review process in place. If a group of bad people post bad things on your site you are responsible - not them. It may seem unfair but as the website owner you are liable for the site legally and in the eyes of the search engines.
6. Check your outbound links. Every month or so make sure the links you are pointing to are still valid and are not pointing at banned sites. If you have outbound links to sites that don’t exist any more your quality ranking may suffer. If your site is pointing links to “bad” sites the search engines think you are endorsing them and ban you! Checking all your outbound links can be a lengthy process but bad-neighborhood.com has automated a lot of this work for us. Just enter your URL and click the button!
7. Don’t plagiarize content. If your content is too similar to content on another site you can get penalized and it isn’t always “who posted first wins” as far as the search engines are concerned (this is an area they are working on). I suggest running your site through Copyscape every so often to make sure your content is really unique and that nobody else is using it. In fact, I discovered 2 sites plagiarizing my content while writing this up! :-(
8. Run a site: check. Occasionally make sure your pages are still in the search engines. This is done with the site: operator like this. In Google watch out for the words “Supplemental Result”. This is often an indicator of a page about to be dropped from the index.
9. Stay informed. The search engines do change things up occasionally so keeping abreast of what’s going on is definitely helpful. There are several great SEO forums and blogs but Donna’s SEO Scoop is among the best for “weather reports” and other search engine updates.
10. Make friends. Having a friend or two that are in the SEO community can be a big help as well. They may help watch your site or give you a heads up if they notice something. See Make Friends Online for some tips.
11. Start with a clean slate. Having encountered this myself, one of the most painful (and expensive) things that can happen to a new website discovering the domain you purchased and publicized is already banned because of bad behavior by a previous owner. Do a little homework with the Wayback Machine before getting a new site started “just in case”. The one site I goy caught on was banned for years and finally reinstated last month after several attempts to straiten things out with Google.
That’s pretty much it. Doing or not doing any of these things doesn’t mean your site will or won’t get penalized because the search engines get a bit weird sometimes but like I said, this stuff will help!
* Why link to these sites if you should stay away from these techniques? Well, “blackhat” isn’t evil or even illegal, just short-term. There are appropriate uses for BH and the blackhat masters at these sites are very knowledgeable. By learning from them you can learn what to avoid while getting a better understanding of how search engines work.
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