10 tips to avoid getting banned by the Search Engines

Everyone wants to get high rankings for their websites. There are various ways to do so and lots of ways that can ban you for getting good rankings. Below are the things you need to avoid if you want to be well positioned in the search engines. Bear in mind that Google and other search engines are intelligent and whatever you do as search engine optimisation on your site will either bring positive or negative results.

1. Duplicate Content
Don’t create multiple small sites or pages with same content somewhere on the internet by just making some small changes. Instead write original content because the search engines won’t get fooled by the duplicate contents.

2. Cloaking
According to Google cloaking is: "a website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling the site." In other words, a human reading the site would see different content than the Googlebot or other search engine robot reading the site. Most of the time, webmasters implement cloaking in order to improve search engine ranking by misleading the robots into thinking the content on the page is different than it really is. Infact doing this will simply get you banned!

3 Bad Neighborhoods Linking
You should be very careful when linking to other sites. It’s better not to link to sites using blackhat SEO techniques. Gamblings sites, adults sites, link farms are all to be avoided. Also beware of fake PR sites.

4. Title Stacking
This is a deceptive technic whereby multiple HTML <title> tag are added on a page. Browsers will ignore the extra tags, but search engine bots may see the extra titles. This technique is not effective with Google and is considered a dirty trick.

5. Doorway Pages
Doorway pages also known as Gateway pages are webpages that are optimized for one keyword but are really designed to be doorway to lead you to different content.

6. Redirect Pages
These pages are created so they rank high but unfortunately when you visit the page, you are directed to another webpage. So the content may be completely different and what you see isn’t what you get!

7. Automated Submission Services
Avoid automated submission services. It is against Google’s terms of service.
Automated Google queries, articles submissions, social bookmarking submissions and automated link submission are all against Google's TOS, and these techniques will get your website banned.

8. Hidden Links
This is when a link is added to a page in such a size that the human visitors cannot see.
This might work for some time but the search engines are sophisticated at catching this and they'll likely remove any offending websites from their search index.

9. Keyword Stuffing
This is the repetition of your keywords in the content of the site. Better to write in a natural way rather than putting repetitive key terms.

10. Invisible Text
This when the text is hidden by using the same colour as the background. The hidden text is meant for the bots and not for the human visitors. This is normally done so you can stuff more keywords without breaking your website content. You will definitely get penalized as soon as the search engines discover it.

Be careful not to use these Black Hat SEO methods because it could cause you a lot of trouble with the search engines. Be careful as well, who you hire to work on your site because some of these things can be done without your knowledge and cause your site to get banned or penalized.

In conclusion, it is advisable to optimize your website for the search engines by writing good original content and linking to related sites. Don't be a jerk to trick your visitors or search engines or take the lazy way out to optimize your website.