Many sites and blogs talk about what to do to get Google to rank you but very few talk about what not to do. With that in mind I like to present a list of 12 things that you should not do, or Google might get mad at you. And we don’t want that do we? While I have named this posts Google DON’Ts, it really applies to all search engines. 1. Never Seek Quick Fixes: If a service promises too much, it probably will not deliver any real long-term value. Products that promise millions of unique visitors or services that email millions of “eager†recipients are anything but quick fixes - they are immediate problems. Subscribing to these services usually results in search engine banishment! 2. Avoid Link Farms: Link farms are sites that link to numerous other sites with the hopes of improving page rankings. Beware: link farms spell immediate trouble - so avoid them at all costs! Engines like Google interpret link farms as spam and actually remove participating Web sites from search engine indexes. 3. Avoid Splash Pages: Flash and heavily graphic introductions prohibit engines from crawling your site. Because crawlers work best with text links, splash pages are very troublesome. A good rule of thumb: always keep your most valuable and compelling information up-front and in text. Bob’s Big Boy (www.bigboy.com) uses a splash page and, as a result, prohibits crawlers from reaching the body of the site. 4. Avoid Frames: Never use pages with frames. Frames are too complex for the crawlers and too cumbersome to index. 5. Avoid Cookies: Never require cookies for Web site access! Search engine crawlers are unable to enter any cookie-required materials; similarly, crawlers are unable to enter or index secure pages (https, password protection, etc). 6. Avoid JavaScript when Possible: Though JavaScript menus are very popular, they disable crawlers from accessing those links. Most, well-indexed Web sites incorporate text-based links primarily because they are search engine friendly. If necessary, JavaScript should be referenced externally. 7. Avoid Search-Box Navigation: Never rely on search boxes for site navigation; engine crawlers are incapable of entering text into search boxes and will be unable to find those pages. 8. Avoid Redirects: Search engines frown upon companies that use numerous Web sites to redirect to a single Web site. 9. Avoid Internal Dynamic URLs on the Home page: Though many sites incorporate internal dynamic links, they should not incorporate those links on the home page. Engine crawlers are currently ill-equipped to navigate dynamic links - which often pass numerous parameters using excessive characters. 10. Session ID’s: Do not leave URL session ID’s on for engine crawlers; they will be unable to access and index your site. 11. Eliminate Pop-Up Ads: Search engines frown upon pop-up advertisements - especially when they occur on the home page! Eliminating all pop-up ads will win favor with the engines and make your site more crawler friendly. 12. Eliminate Hidden / Invisible Text: Search engines immediately recognize hidden text and consider such practices to be “cheating.†For more information on natural search best practices, see Google’s Webmaster page.
Thanks a lot just wanna add this : 13. All what you said was right till April 2006, and after that nobody knows what is really makes Google mad at you and de-index your pages.
I don't know what the heck Google wants. I had a site take 6 months to finally show up on the 3rd page in the index for my highly competetive keyword. It stayed there for 2 weeks and I was getting traffic galore for 2 weeks. Then, whammo. No ranking. Not banned, just no ranking. It makes me want to spit. Then, I see my competetion ranking on the first page for my keyword, and they got there by signing guestbooks! Nobody truly knows the combination that floats Googles boat.
Of course you can do 301 redirects if necessary. Also if I may wanna add to your #5, avoid using session id's on pages you'd like to optimize. But then again, rules changes and likely more should be added in the list...
When did your ranking dissapear after getting out of the sandbox ebno? Do you think you were thrown back in to the sandbox? Pete
Yeah 301s have their place when you have canonical url problems. java and dynamic menus are a very important feature for a quality feel to a site so I would not say dont use them but supplement the site with a text link nav too.
Hey that was a very good piece of information. Here are somemore tips - 1. Hidden text - Googlebot and other robots learned to recognize this method several years ago. So if you don’t want to be identified as spammer and banned from SERP’s, don’t use this method. Hidden links - Number of incoming links to certain page has direct effect to Google PageRank (PR). However, if those are hidden that may produce similar results as with hidden text. Cloaking - Cloaking is a search engine optimization method where you serve highly optimized page version to robots and a regular page to your visitors. Official Google policy is that cloaked pages will not be allowed in their index. However, there are many websites that use cloaking with great success. So if you like to risk getting banned from SERP’s you may use this method, just make sure you do it properly Guest book spamming and FFA pages - Adding your link to hundreds of guest books will not help you with your PR, since it appears that Google is able to detect them and ignores outgoing links completely. This way you’ll save yourself many hours of useless work. When PR was initially introduced, many SEO companies were offering to “submit your site to zillion FFA pages for free†and hopefully increase your PR. I don’t remember that this used to work at time and it certainly doesn’t work now. If you find any of these, avoid them