How to avoid getting banned by Google
Though Google does not ban pages often. It regularly penalises websites in different other ways like reducing their rankings, suspending the websites etc.
Originally published at www.wildreams.co.
The 2 main reasons Google penalises websites are when the sites in manipulative ways try to increase their site rankings and when the websites provide poor User Experience to visitors.
Below are some of the ways not to fall into this trap and get penalised or ultimately banned from the search engine.
1. Never buy links
The more other websites link to your site, the better your content does on search engines.
As the search engines are made to believe it is really good stuff you got there.
So, in an attempt to get this result, a lot of website owners go on and buy links to their sites.
This is against internet best practices and search engines have a way of finding this out.
Once the search engines find out you actually bought links to your site, they would surely penalize for that.
2. Copying content from another website
This “copy and paste” practice has become really rampant especially among small news blogs but search engines do not like it.
Duplicate content is not beneficial to search engines because when they see two really similar pieces of content, it becomes difficult for them deciding which one to rank.
So they would rather just lower the rank of the one that seems copied from another source.
Even if you don’t get caught by search engines, these days, website owners and content creators are using tools like Copyscape andCopyGator to find discover such.
If they find you out, you could be easily reported.
3. Reposting the same content
It gets to a point sometimes that content creators are either lazy or have exhausted all their contents and thus begin to recycle the same content.
They upload the same article but change the heading, a few words and generally reshape it.
However, Google’s bots are getting smarter every day, so they are usually quick to spot this kind of practice these days and penalise websites that engage in this.
4. Keyword stuffing
This is just the practice of overusing a particular keyword or set of keywords on a page to rank high for on search engines.
It used to be the best way to rank content but now, it could get you penalised.
Gone are the days when all you had to do to rank your content about “good schools” for example was write sentences like
“there are many good schools in Nigerian doing things only good schools could do like checking up on the students after school because they are in a good school…”.
Though the use of keywords is very important, it is more important than the content makes sense and is enjoyably readable. No one wants to see keywords all over the place.
5. Linking to websites in another language
This also has become a common practice among website owners. They do this to provide reciprocal links to the sites.
This could, however, count against you as users usually prefer viewing content in one language.
So when Google discovers that the bounce rates from your links are really high, they could penalise your site for that.
6. Bad links
Make sure your links are always working.
Never link to a website not up and running and you have to go back and keep checking to make sure your links are working.
Both the links to pages on your website and links to pages on other websites.
If they are not working, you give search engines the impression that you don’t care about User Experience, so they would rather just drank you.
7. Never link to websites containing illegal content like arms, hard drugs, child pornography, etc
Even if you do not post or promote illegal content on your website, the fact that you are linking to sites that do is a huge turn off for search engines.
This could easily get you penalised avoid it.
8. Your website should never be down
If your website is ranking high on Google and traffic is as a result coming to it, but it is found out that the website is down, Google would rather just remove it from its index that keeps sending people to it.
Therefore, if you have noticed that your website is getting a lot more traffic than you intended, you might want to increase its bandwidth.
You don’t want your website going down because of traffic overload.
Has your page ever been penalised by Google for any of the above or similar reasons? Share in the comments section.
