5 SEO Abuses That Will Get a Domain Banned

While some of these are innocent mistakes, others are obvious attempts to 'break the rules' and Google Webmaster Guidelines. Most of these abuses at one time were not considered problems by the major search engines, though over the years these have become 'red flags' . Search engines now have strict rules in place to punish websites for breaking published guidelines. These punishments could be a 30-day drop in organic rankings to the most severe total ban of the domain from the search results.

There are many HTML validators available on the Internet to check your web page to make sure it is acceptable. The most unfortunate part of having a domain banned, is that often it is the result of either a SEO contractor or company breaking the accepted web master rules for their client (and the client has no clue about it) or a regular person is unaware of what they are doing can be a potential problem.

Invisible Text

This has been going on for years on the Internet. White text on white background...or basically whatever color your background is, don't use the same color for your text. Why? Because it becomes 'invisible' to the human eye and typically is a trick used to hide keywords for ranking. This is the oldest and lamest abuse you could possibly do. It is also the most obvious to search engines.

Paid Links

Buying links, or a listing in a link directory, was common practice for a number of years. Many people paid, and still pay, to have a link on a high page rank site to boost their web site's ranking and thus do better in organic search results. At one time, search engines really didn't care about if you had paid a some web site to have a link back to yours. Then in 2007, Google came down pretty hard on the link exchange programs on the Internet. Google decided to give less weight to those 'Link Directories' and 'Paid Links' became a taboo. Paid links and link directories are now shunned by the search engines and they favor more of a natural link exchange system.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are basically web sites, or a web page, that is optimized for a keyword. The problem that the search engines don't like about these types of pages are that it directs the visitor to the true web site when any hyperlink, URL, is clicked. Or worse, has an automatic refresh (see below) to a different web site. Thus the 'doorway' to the real web site. Google and Yahoo really don't like these tactics and your web site can potentially be yanked from their search results index permanently.

Redirects

There are 2 kinds of redirects. The first is a redirect of a page when it is moved or when a web site is moved. The best way to handle this situation is by using a 301 redirect in the .htacces file. This is an accepted authorized redirect by all search engines. The other type of redirect is a meta redirect that used to be ok, but was severely abused over the years and now all of the search engines will punish you for using it.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a broad term, but generally speaking, it is using the same keyword many times in a web page to such a degree that it becomes difficult to read the content on the web page. This has been a problem since the first web page was ever created for SEO purposes. To set the record on this, search engines have gotten smart over the years and recognize when this is occurring on a web page. Since this was, and to this day, still being abused, search engines totally ignore the meta-keyword content. So 'stuffing' that information in an image or meta tag is totally useless, yet can still get your web site banned because it is obvious to the search engines that you are trying to abuse and manipulate the organic search results.

It is not hard to build a web page that follows the rules and does not break accepted webmaster guidelines. There are 5 Beginner, 5 Intermediate and 5 Advanced SEO techniques that can help in your SEO efforts. However, these 5 abuses will get a web site banned if and when it is crawled by a search engine, or reported by a web surfer.

Stay away from risky, or Black Hat, SEO techniques when creating content for your web site or having a SEO company do the work for you. It is not worth the risk of getting your web site penalized or banned.

Jason Perry

Two great SEO tools which can help track the success of your web site are WebPosition 4 and Hits Link. Both which you can try for free.