Oh dear… has your site been banned by Google? I know the feeling you currently have, that gut wrenching fear and loss of control. Where has the site gone? Why has the site gone? When will it be back? I have been developing and marketing websites since 2003, many of those sites I promoted using techniques that today would be considered “alternative”. I don’t shy away from this because it means that I have the scars of battle with the search engines…. believe me, you can quickly achieve a short term gain with Black Hat techniques, however long term it is not a viable marketing strategy.
View the search engines as your source of free targeted traffic. Don’t mess with them, give them what they want… great content and information. Play by their rules and they will reward you. Every business in the UK should follow the webmaster guidelines, if you don’t then you’re running the risk of being banned.
If you do not know whether you are following Google Webmaster Guidelines, then start asking some questions. Click on the link and read through what they say. If you work with an SEO agency, get them to confirm and demonstrate that they are not risking your business by using SEO techniques outside of the guidelines.
Ok, if you’re on this page it is probably an emergency and you’re keen to get to the meat of the problem. So let’s have a look at some of the reasons your site might be banned, or lost its ranking. We’re looking at the quality (sometimes technical) part of your website, rather than the look and feel. Please note this is a summary of potential issues, if you know your site fits into any of the points below then it is worth doing something about it as not doing anything will affect your rankings.
Broken Links and incorrect HTML
There’s not much more frustrating that broken links, 404 pages, error pages etc. If you consider that Google wants to provide relevant and helpful content to its users and your site and your competitors site have similar content; the next step for Google will be to check the quality of the links and code. If your competitor matches W3C and has not broken links compared to your site, then guess who gets shown first.
Dynamic Pages
You won’t get banned from Google for having dynamic pages, however it is not going to help you. An example of a dynamic page is a URL that has a ? in the title and is created because the site has queried a database; often this refers to shopping carts. A dynamic page URL by nature changes, whereas a static page does not. This means it can be indexed by the search engines, which is good.
Number of links on your page
You should not have more than 100 links on your page. That is a rule and part of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you have more than 100 links on your page, then you have broken their terms. Lots of sites do this, especially today when a lot of sites include links to social media and bookmarking sites. If you’ve lost a bit of ranking recently and not sure why, then this could be one of the reasons.
Make your web pages for users
There is a temptation for website owners to try and deceive the search engines, the upside for this is more traffic and more sales, so you can understand why people are tempted to do it. One method webmasters have used is cloaking, which means that the search engine is presented with one set of content and the user is presented with something completely different. This is a technique that will get you banned.
Don’t use tricks to try and outsmart Google
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world today; they are also the smartest search engine and know their onions for sure. So why anyone would want to try and outsmart them is beyond me. As already mentioned in this post, in the short term you may get away with it, however if you’re looking for a long term search marketing strategy, it will not work for you. In simple terms, anything outside of the Webmaster Guidelines is a trick, so try and keep to the rules.
Links
This is a big one. In the early days of the Internet, optimising your website was simply about throwing a website up and getting loads of links. This strategy no longer applies and falls into the “tricks” category. The areas to look into here are:
1. The sites you’re linking out to… bad neighbourhoods don’t go near them. Don’t be associated in any way with them.
2. Link building schemes - Run for the hills. It is about natural link growth, if you’re part of a link exchange scheme, this could be having a detrimental effect on your ranking. If you need more information about the definitions, visit Google’s Link Schemes page
3. Reciprocal links are ok, they are not going to get you banned but it is worth considering your reciprocal link strategy.
4. Buying and selling links is not a good strategy for increasing your search engine rankings. If you’re buying links to increase traffic, this is slightly different and can be neutralised from a SEO perspective by using the “nofollow” technique.
We recommend that you think about why you are linking to a page, is it for the benefit of your visitors/users or is it because you believe you are getting an advantage from the search engine. If it is the latter, then you’re playing the wrong game.
Hidden text and links
I have to be honest, this used to be one of my favourite techniques. It would be very easy to hide text and links on a page and the search engines never used to mind. Times change and Google very much discourage this technique, usually if you are caught you will be subject to a ban.
Make sure you do not have malware or other bad code on your site
This is a serious one and has been on the increase in recent years. The premise of this advice is simple, don’t create pages that phish for information, install Trojans or virus etc. So this is quite obvious why Google would not want to rank your site. However, sometimes this types of software can be installed on a site without the webmaster being aware of it. So this can be about security of your site. We saw an example recently where phishing pages had been uploaded to a website. The only time the customer knew about it was when their server company contacted them to say they had suspended their site.
Keyword stuffing
A lot of webmasters “keyword stuff” their pages without knowing the affect. Unfortunately, it is an issue within our industry and a result of poor advice. Too many keywords on a page is keyword stuffing, so try to create content first and foremost to be read by your users.
Duplicate content
There are two types of duplicate content, one type is content that has been taken from another website and repurposed in the same way. There are many reasons why you would do this and it happens regularly without issue as long as a credit is applied. The challenge happens when you try to rank well for that page. If you think about it logically, Google has already indexed a piece of content that is the same as yours. The original piece of content was there before yours, so why would they choose to rank you above the original source?
The other less known issue with duplicate content is when you have duplicate content on your own site. Sometimes this can be an issue when a site has not defined its www.domain or http://domain properly. Google effectively has 2 pages to look at and decide which is most important, this can impact your rankings significantly.
There are a few other reasons your site could be banned or losing rankings. The important thing to note is that whatever the issue, as long as it can be identified and fixed; then your website has every chance of recovering its Google rankings. If you would like any help and advice in this area help and advice in this area, please feel free to contact with our SEO Consultants.