7 Ways to Avoid a Website Spanking from Google
Optimizing your site for search engine traffic is one, if not the main reason, companies spend the big bucks on their marketing budget. A highly optimized site attracts quality traffic around the clock, giving your business more leads and sales, even when your employees are taking a break. It’s critical that you continually practice “white hat” optimization techniques to avoid being penalized (or site spanked) by Google. If Google finds your methods of optimization to be flawed you’re your rankings will suffer, and you can potentially get blocked or dropped from all search results.
Steer clear of these simple mistakes and prevent your site from getting “spanked” by Google.
1. Robots.txt– The robots.txt is not necessary in the improvement of SEO. However, if structured incorrectly you can inadvertently block pages on your site from being indexed by Google. To avoid this make sure to have an experienced SEO professional implement robots.txt properly across your site.
2. Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest spam techniques in the book. So why, you ask, are we going over it again? Bad habits die hard. Nowadays, there are still SEO consultants and specialists that tout the need for “high keyword density” across your site. 2 years ago having a page with between 3-5% keyword density was important. Today, what has more influence is the relevancy of your content to a pages title tags. If you keyword stuff you will get caught (and spanked).
3. Content–Content is king, and duplicate content is a strong websites kryptonite. It’s a common mistake many websites make, and can be detrimental to your site’s authority factor and user-experience. If you have to repeat content and copy on your site to fill a page, you don’t need that page.
4. Ads – The Google “Panda” update has been a hot topic. Most pundits have eluded that if a company has a unusual amount of ads, especially Google Adsense ads, that a brand may be penalized. There isn’t any hard data to support this as yet, but it is a common moan industry wide. Also, take care to not affiliate with sites that provide little to no value. The official word from Google is that affiliate ads are acceptable, but only if they offer additional value that goes beyond the actual affiliate offer.
5. Outgoing Links – Linking to other websites is vitally important for blogs. It provides useful resources for your readers as well as adding authority to your content in your readers' eyes. Given how search engines handle page rank transfer, though, many webmasters have stopped linking out entirely in order to hoard their page rank. Google engineers recommend strongly against this, but linking out can be risky. What should you do? Be conservative. You can link to other authority sites, only those that provide useful data similar to your own content.
6. Backlinks– Be weary of deals like, 7000 links for $25. These seem too good to be true because they are. They will lead you directly to a penalty.
7. Algorithm Change– In some cases a loss of traffic or rankings has nothing to do with you or your site. Google changes and refines its algorithm constantly. Even Google makes mistakes, take for instance many legit websites that got penalized with the Panda Update. Typically Google will resolve this, but if not you can contact them to file a complaint.