Search Engines Don’t Like SEO

It’s no secret that search engine operators don’t like people manipulating the results through optimization, but this is exactly what search engine optimizers (SEO’s) do. So if you make it blatantly obvious that you are performing SEO on your website then the search engines are going to penalize your website. Therefore when performing SEO for your website you must always make sure what you’re doing is not frowned upon by the search engines.

If your website gets banned by the search engines then it means you’ve probably done something drastically bad to the extent where they don’t want to list your website at all.
So how do you know if your website is banned?

So how can you check whether your website is banned by a search engine?

Check the search results

If you go to Google and simply type the URL of your website you should be presented with something similar to below: -

If you enter your domain and you get a message saying “Sorry, no information is available for the URL: xyz” then chances are your site is banned.

The only other time you may receive this message is if your website is brand new and hasn’t been crawled by the search engines yet.

Check the PageRank Bar

If you download the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) then you can view the PageRank of every website you visit. If you navigate to your website and you see a gray bar where your PageRank would normally be displayed (as the graph above displays), then this is a very strong indication that your website has been banned.

So what are the tell-tail signs of optimization, and how I avoid them?

When you optimize your website you should always think about how your website will appear from the point of view of the search engines. There are six common pitfalls that people fall into when optimizing their websites, and will usually account for 99% of all problems:

No diversity in Anchor Text

Search Engines like natural linking, that is where a website links to another out of choice, so if a website has 100 inbound links that all have exactly the same anchor text, is that natural? No, quite the opposite, it’s highly unnatural. In order to avoid this pitfall, you should vary your link anchor text for each link partnership you set-up, or each time you submit to a web directory. If you’re smart about your link anchor text then there is no way your linking strategy will look unnatural

Getting Backlinks Too Quickly

If you operate a new website and you get backlinks too quickly then this is often a clear sign of optimization tactics. Even worse, is the situation where all of these backlinks contain exactly the same anchor text (as previously mentioned). If you operate a new website you should build links slowly. As I’ve mentioned already, the search engines like to see natural linking, if your website is only a week old and already has 200 backlinks, is that natural? Link building should be a gradual process, and you should resist the urge to try to get thousands of links as soon as you launch your site. Although your intentions may be well intended, you may actually be doing more harm than good.

Keyword Stuffing

Another important step to prevent being your website being penalized is to ensure you don’t over-optimize your website. That is to say don’t ‘keyword stuff’. Keyword stuffing is a form of spamming where you use your keyword or keyphrase over-and-over again in your web page in order to increase the keyword’s weighting in the body text. The search engines can spot deliberate spamming quite easily, and as a result, should be avoided.

Usually if you write a well written, informative web page then there is no need to ‘optimize’ a web page, as you will have naturally mentioned your keyword/phrase in the text. The only thing you should consider optimizing is the Title tag, this should always contain your primary keyword or phrase.

Title Tag, Meta Tag , Image Alt Tag Spamming

In addition to over-optimization of your body text, you can also be penalized for spamming your tag attributes. For example if you create a title tag that looks like

Then the search engines are likely to take a dislike to this and may penalize your website.

Duplicating Content

Search engines like unique content; they don’t like seeing the same information being duplicated across multiple domains. I have seen instances where websites have been dropped from the search engines for doing exactly this. If you must insist on duplicating content from other web pages then you should disallow access to it using your robots.txt file to avoid any potential problems. To do this create a file in the root of your website so that it can be access by going to http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt

In the robots.txt file your can disallow access to particular files on your website

Disallow: myduplicatedpage.html

Or you may also specify directories:

Disallow: /mycontent/

Hidden Text

Hidden text is where you create text on your web page that is the same colour as the background colour, so it is in effect hidden. This allows you to enter your target keywords and phrases without the viewer of the website aware that the text is there.

In this example I’ve gone to a website that has hidden text (I’ll keep their identity secret)

Hidden Text Example

If I then select all of the text on the website by pressing ctrl-a I can see that the website has a lot of hidden text at the top of the page

Viewing Hidden Text

Drastically Changing Your File Structure

By drastically changing the file structure or filenames of your website, you run the risk of damaging your search engine rankings. Although there’s no actual reason why search engines would penalize for this. However, I have seen occassions where websites have changed their file structure and filenames and have seen their search engine rankings take a big hit because of it. One way around this is to redirect your old pages to your new pages, in time the search engines will update their listings and you will not suffer any adverse affects

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See original article here.

More than making your website beautiful and standards-compliant, it is also important that it is full of relevant content. Our main goal should always be making the site “seen” throughout the web. This is why we do SEO. And this is why you need to make your website “content-packed”. But you have to do it the right way.

There are five (5) most important ingredients of a complete and most of all, search-engine friendly sites:
• Standard-compliant and beautiful design
• Good navigation
• Relevant Information
• Link popularity
• Link exchange

All these elements need to work together properly in order for the site to maximize its potentials and serve its purpose. And content is of major importance because without a good one, there would basically be nothing for the Search Engines to crawl.

In writing website content, you take note of the following:

• Conciseness of information

Keep it short and crisp. Be positive and direct to the point. Never be too abstract and no need to create so many long pages about the same blurbs. Make all your pages relevant to the information or services you offer your readers or target customers.

Do not overload a single page with so much information under one heading. Make it a habit to create subheads and put limits to the number of words depending on what you are writing about and your target readers. The ideal is 400 -500 words generally and 1000-1200 words for the more informative sections of the site.

• Relevance of SEO Keywords

Never forget to include in your content the words that your target audiences are most likely to type on the search fields of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, and other search engines. Keep in mind that you need to put these keywords in the title tags, meta tags and descriptions and of course, scatter them all over your content to make them searchable.

• Good grammar and sentence construction

Poor content can be such a turn off to readers, especially those that are absurdly constructed. The web is a universal venue for exchange of information and since English is the universal language, you must learn how to write your content in grammatically correct English sentences so that your site will be taken seriously by readers.

• Relevance of Links

Never post unnecessary links or those that do not have anything to do with what your website is all about. Doing so could decrease your site’s credibility.

There are different types of sitemaps: the Conventional ones, which are in either .txt or HTML format; and the Special one, which is in XML form. The difference between the two is that conventional sitemaps are for both human and spider use while the latter is specifically for the Googlebot spiders. This is why the XML Sitemaps are called Google Sitemaps. Yahoo and MSN still keep the HTML format. Both the Conventional and Special forms can be used on your website and it will not be penalized by Google for the duplication. XML Sitemaps follow the Google Sitemap Protocols.

How do Search Engine robots use sitemaps? They will follow every single link on your sitemap that leads to the pages of your site and thus, the pages will get crawled and then indexed. SEO experts believe that best place to put the sitemap link for the conventional sitemap is on the homepage at the top right side of the page.

XML Sitemaps are made especially for Google. The conventional ones do not give Googlebot spiders any restriction on what pages they can crawl. There are some parts of the website that cannot easily be reached by the Google crawlers. Examples of these are the dynamic elements behind a search form. But Google sitemaps provide web developers with a way to direct Google to the pages on their site that they want to be crawled and give details on what order these pages should be crawled, how important they are in comparison with one another and how often they are updated or revised.

You can also use Sitemap Generators to create sitemaps for you. Sitemap Generators crawl the URL you provide and generate sitemap details and the number of pages in that website. You can just download the generated file and save it as “sitemap.xml”. You can try the Sitemap Generator at http://www.sitemapz.com/

Once the sitemap is created, the next step is to submit it to Google.

Using a sitemap might not bring results too easily but keep in mind that search engines dynamically improve their sitemap indexing algorithms and in time, they will surely index websites faster through sitemaps.

There is no use to having a very relevant, greatly designed website on the internet without anyone ever seeing it. Search engine submission is undoubtedly the most important way of promoting your website and getting listed in the major search engines so that people can view your website and allow it to serve its main purpose.

Here is one of the absolute BEST “how-to” tips that I ever got.

Get this software http://www.submiteaze.com/ and submit your website to every free directory it has in the database.

Make sure you mix up the title and descriptions.  You don’t want everything saying exactly the same thing.  I would aim for about 10 title variations and 10 description variations.  You can use this ”spinner” to help you create the variations.

There have been well-documented sites that have started to show results after about 2 months of using these softwares. Results will depend on how much previous optimization has been done.

You may submit at a rate of about 20 sites per day.

Keep in mind that whatever you do to promote your website, do it legally. Never falsely represent your pages in order to rank high.