27th July 2007

The Disease of Google Banning: Are You At Risk?

By : Nidhi Gupta

Definition:

Google banning occurs when Google removes your site from its index and flags your domain as ‘banned’, so it won’t spider your site anymore. It is actually a serious disease and may be even life threatening specially for small websites.

Etiology:

Webmasters’ mistakes are almost always the leading causes of google banning; here are some of the common mistakes that will get your website banned:

  1. Using small or hidden text in your web pages. Some webmasters will try to use hidden text containing certain keywords inside their site, so that the text is not visible by the human eyes, but visible by search engines.

  2. Using popular keywords such as “sex, mp3, yahoo” in the meta tags when the subject of your site has nothing to do with those keywords is commonly called keyword stuffing.

  3. Participating in Link farms. Link farms or Free-for-all links pages are pages that consist of links and exist solely to help listed sites gain higher search engine rankings. These pages have no unique content just links. Obviously you can’t control which sites link back to you, but if you link to link farms, your site will get banned.

  4. Submitting multiple versions of the exact same page or an identical page for indexing. Some webmasters try to increase their page count by having similar pages and only changing the title, subject or small word changes.

  5. Using unauthorized automated software to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs violate Google’s terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google. It is better to hand submit your site and only do so once a month.

  6. Keyword stuffing: adding too many keywords in Meta tags or page text is called Spam and will get you banned. For example, if your website contains 400 words and the keyword phrase “website advertising” is repeated 50 times, the search engines will most likely think you are spamming them.

  7. Using Doorway pages: Doorway pages are Web pages designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website. They are standalone pages designed only to act as doorways to your site. Doorway pages are a very bad idea for several reasons, though many SEO firms use them routinely.

  8. Linking to a banned site, specially extensive linking as in networks.

  9. Registering an already banned domain. Some webmasters, after their website becomes banned from google due to any reason, delete this domain and register another while the first domain remains banned from google. So, before you register a domain, make sure it is not banned by doing the test mentioned below in “Diagnosis”.

Manifestations:

  1. The earliest manifestations of google banning are usually first noticed by the webmaster as a sudden and severe drop in the number of website visitors and when the webmaster tracks the referrers of his visitors, he will not find anymore visitors coming to his site from google.

  2. Sudden drop of the google PageRank of all pages of the website from any level to 0.

The combination of the above 2 symptoms is highly suspicious for google banning specially if they occur suddenly to an “old”, established, high ranking website. In case of “newly born” websites, the diagnosis may be difficult depending on the above manifestations alone as these manifestations may be normal and transient for new sites which have not been indexed by google yet and so their pagerank is still 0. In this case, we need an “urgent” diagnostic test.

Diagnosis:

The diagnosis of google banning is very easy, even for new sites that have not been indexed by google yet. The diagnosis is made by a simple, accurate, and rapid test:

Test: Provided the site suspected for google banning is called www.suspected-domain.com, do a search in google for www.suspected-domain.com.

Results and interpretation: if www. suspected-domain.com is banned, google will say: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.suspected-domain.com” WITHOUT a direct link to www.suspected-domain.com. This sign differentiates between banned sites and new non-indexed sites. In the later case, there will be a direct link to www.suspected-domain.com, and google search results will say: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.suspected-domain.com” followed by “If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: www.suspected-domain.com”. This sign is absent in banned sites.

Complications:

Google banning is an infectious disease; all sites linking to the banned site are at a risk of catching the banning. So it is usual that many link partners escape and on the long run, the site will lose many of its inbound links.

Prevention:

Prevention is always easier than treatment, and fortunately, google banning is a preventable disease. Prevention is easy, you don’t need to do anything to avoid banning, just don’t do bad things, most of them are mentioned above.

Treatment:

Unfortunately, no curative treatment is available and the prognosis is bad, just palliative treatment:

  • Treatment of the cause: The first thing to do is to correct the cause. If you are not sure there must be some errors you suspect, correct all of them.

  • Isolation: if you have other websites linking to the banned sites, remove their links to it to avoid them catching the infection.

  • Writing to google:After you have corrected all possible errors, email google at webmaster@google.com with an reinclusion request. The following is a template of reinclusion request letter:
    Dear Google,
    I am the owner of http://www.banned-domain.com/
    I did not realize that (doing a mistake) was a bad thing that would get me banned from Google. Now, I understand that I have done a mistake, and I apologize profusely. I have removed (bad thing) from my site, and I promise not to make this mistake again.
    I am asking you to Please Consider reinstating my website, http://www.banned-domain.com/ , into Google’s Index.
    Sincerely,

  • Domain transplantation: many people just ditch the former domain name and start with something new. It is much easier to build a site from a PR3 or PR4 (which most new sites are given) rather than trying to dig a banned site from the depths of PR0.

  • Last word:

    Google banning is google’s defense mechanism to keep their search results as accurate and useful as possible and it is their right, however, in my opinion, it is a very severe and even fatal punishment for webmasters’ mistakes. If google has the right to ban a site from its search results, its right to take off its pagerank is questionable. Page rank is a measure of site popularity and “I am bad” does not necessarily mean that “I am not popular”.

    Get More Details At : Ezinearticles.com

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    posted in SEO/Search Engine News | 0 Comments

    27th July 2007

    Can Meta Tags such as the Keyword tag bring High Rankings to My Site?

    By : Nidhi Gupta

    If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag would be the one to give up. Everyone knows that to obtain high search engine rankings all you have to do is put the keywords that you want to rank high with into your meta tags, right? Not even close! Its not that simple. How many of you reading this article have obsessed over meta tags such as the keyword tag?

    How many of you have tried putting every relevant keyword you could think of into this meta tag, only to have your site continue to be nearly invisible in the search engines? How many of you couldn’t decide if you should put commas between the keywords? Spaces? No commas? ALL CAPS? Plurals?

    What Does This Meta Tag Look Like?

    This meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta description tags in the HEAD section of your pages’ HTML code.

    If this meta tag were a child, it would be put into a foster home due to all the abuse it has received over the years! In the prehistoric days of the Internet, meta keyword tags were a great little tool for the search engines to use to help them determine how to rank sites in their search results. When the engines’ databases were small, this meta tag was a quick, easy method to help decide which keywords might be important on a site.

    However, as always happens with anything this simple, people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were searching with the keyword “computer”, for instance, they’d put that word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to their site, even though their site had nothing to do with computer!

    Personally, I don’t quite understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors but apparently the goal was to bring in traffic.

    Over time, less and less weight was given to poor abused meta tags, and more and more weight was given to the actual content of the pages. Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed for time and had to give up one meta tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words within these meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of your Web pages.

    Should I Bother With Meta Keyword Tags?

    Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them. At worst, it won’t hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly keyword stuff them).

    What Should I Put in these Meta Tags?

    First let’s recap what needs to be done before you attempt to create meta keyword tags (ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever created):

    • Choose your relevant keywords.
    • Write the site’s content based on these keywords.
    • Create a title tag using the same keywords.
    • Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also based on these keywords.

    Once you do the above things properly, putting together your meta keyword tag is a very simple procedure.

    Usually, keywords used in the title of the page are used in the meta keyword tag. The first words in any tag are assumed to be given more weight, so these are most important. Then, go through each paragraph of text on the page and take any important phrases that might be used in the copy and paste them into the meta keyword tag. Separate the phrases with a comma and no space. This is simply a personal preference. Using no commas at all in this tag is basically the same thing, since most engines appear to treat commas as a space. After getting every important word or phrase from the text on the page, add some common misspellings of some of these same words. In the past, this could bring some traffic from some engines, most notably AltaVista.

    What About Keyword Repetition?

    Another common abuse of meta keyword tags was — and still is — the repetition of words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords enough times in this meta tag, the search engines would “think” they were relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for those keywords. Because of this abuse, too much repetition will now hurt you rather than help you. Never insert the same word twice in a row in this tag, even if you’re using different variations. (Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use that word more than three or four times within the tag, even if you’re using different variations of it.

    That’s about all there is to it! If everyone treated these meta tags with the type of respect they deserve and only put relevant keywords into it, perhaps we could get it out of its foster home and back to its rightful place in the family of meta tags!

    Get More Details At : Highrankings.com

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    posted in SEO/Search Engine News | 0 Comments

    27th July 2007

    How to Get Considerable Backlinks to Your Website!

    By : Admin

    Getting considerable backlinks of high quality and high relativity for a new website is a cumbersome job because it requires both- a lot of time and technique! It is difficult in real terms however; there are still many ways out.

    • You can try submitting your URL to some professional directory websites, like DOMZ, yahoo, ODP, etc. It is a proven and effective solution. In addition, you can choose to summit your site to some famous websites that index many URL’s of great varieties. You can, also, adjust your strategies by shifting your attention to the some other websites which have lower popularity. Summit it and your site popularity will be improved step by step.

    • Link exchange is also one of the effective ways for backlinks. You can take advantage of forums or other popular platforms to air your exchange offer. Especially, you had better add an automatic link application function so that other webmasters will initiate link exchange with you.

    • By and large, keep a good relationship with guilds or governmental institutions, which is a special kind of links. Such non-profit organizations always stand for authority, by linking with which it will improve the reliability and authority of your website.

    • Find the link backs of your competitor’s, and try to build up links with them. You should own all that your competitors have and ought to have what they don’t have.

    • Post articles of high quality attached with your links at forums. It is considerable that your content should be original, high quality, spelling-mistakes free and relevant. Do not post a thread purely on advertising your website or products, because thus the thread or even your ID will be likely deleted by the editor because of spam. It is advisable to post in the suitable column and try to be helpful. Then you might be considered as an expert in this field and they may think it is necessary to visit your site.

    • Try creating blog in the blog website, and add your site URL to your blog. Many experts agree on the point that the significance of blog cannot be ignored.

    • Summit your website to those websites found by search engine to increase your backlinks.

    • Purchasing backlinks is also an effective idea, but pay attention to the price and the quality of that website itself.

    • You can put as many professional articles as you can, if you have time and expertise in a certain field. The more articles you contribute, the more effect it will bring to the backlinks and promotion your website.

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    posted in SEO/Search Engine News | 0 Comments

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