| u want Google to rank your website highly, you must | | | | a one-month old domain is not going to be written |
| avoid all appearances of spam. | | | | about by 10,000 people on brand-new blogs. |
| Many webmasters unknowingly promote their | | | | 3. Duplicate content. This is an easy trap to fall into, |
| websites with methods that Google regards as | | | | because many people have been promoting their |
| spammy. It's easy to fall into such a trap, because | | | | sites by writing articles and getting them published on |
| technology allows us to automate and speed up the | | | | many different websites. Keep your own website |
| process of doing things to promote our websites, | | | | content all-original. Don't even reprint your own |
| and not all these things seem to hurt anybody as | | | | promotional articles that you submit to article |
| ordinary email spam does. | | | | directories or other websites. |
| But any action you take that substitutes automation | | | | 4. Any large, sudden surge of links to your site. |
| for the efforts of a human being, makes you and | | | | Yes, links to your site are good things, and Google |
| your website suspicious to Google. Rightly or | | | | likes them and uses them to increase your Page |
| wrongly, they regard all such automation as subject | | | | Rank. But Google also believes that it takes time for |
| to abuse. So it can get you banned, your Page Rank | | | | other webmasters to find, notice and link to the |
| reduced to 0 or your pages exiled to their | | | | content pages on your site. |
| Supplemental results. | | | | If this month your site has no links and next month is |
| Here are some spam flags to avoid: | | | | has 1000 -- that's not natural. And Google knows it. |
| 1. All the usual on-page black hat SEO techniques. | | | | You've been doing something spammy. |
| Most people today know to avoid most of them: | | | | 5. Any large, sudden surge of pages on your site. |
| invisible text, hidden images, keywords stuffed | | | | Yes, useful or entertaining content is good. Google |
| metatags and so on. Don't use automated web page | | | | loves it, but Google also knows that you can write |
| generation software. Cloaking is one which is still is still | | | | only so many words a day. If your site has only 10 |
| in widespread use. But Google is working hard to | | | | pages this month, but 10,000 next month, Google |
| detect and ban sites using it. | | | | knows you didn't write them all. |
| 2. Spam blogs or splogs. You can buy software which | | | | So even if you obtained that content through |
| can create up to 10,000 blogs, post some keywords | | | | legitimate outsourcing, don't upload it to your site all |
| of "content," create links back to your website, and | | | | at once. Add only 10 to 20 pages a week. |
| then ping the blog directories. Google owns Blogger | | | | Some of these spam flags may seem unreasonably |
| and actively patrols it for blogs it deems suspicious. | | | | restrictive. Unfortunately, there're many webmasters |
| Google can't take down blogs hosted on other | | | | who make these rules necessary by abusing the |
| servers, but it can and does ban sites linked to by | | | | system any way they can. |
| splogs. Google is not stupid. It knows that a site with | | | | |