Aug
2
Tips to Avoid a Search Engine Penalty
Avoid Search Engine Penalties
Any time there is a major change in the search engines, specifically Google, there is always a loud cry afterward that Google has banned undeserving websites. The fact is most sites are never banned and they are usually not even penalized. Too often webmasters confuse a change in the algorithm as some sort of penalty when it is just business as usual. You don’t have to do anything wrong on your website or even make changes to your website to be caught up in search engine algorithm changes. It’s the proverbial – it rains on both sinners and saints kind of thing.
That said, many sites do in fact at time put themselves in a position to receive a penalty. I have listed some basic steps to help avoid search engine penalties. Some of these tips only apply if you have multiple websites that interlink – which is actually quite common – as well as a common way to get penalized.
Watch Your Network of Sites
Avoid the following on your network:
- Using the same Google Adsense accounts across your network
- Same Webmaster Tools on all sites. You may want to avoid using Webmaster tools entirely if you are concerned about your network. We don’t counsel webmasters to break Google’s TOS, but if you do then you should keep away from WMT.
- Using the same Google Analytics account or any analytics account that will leave an identifying footprint
- All your sites use the same domain name registrar
- All your sites use the same hosting account or server
- Having the same domain owner on all your sites
- Same IP on all sites
Here are a few other things to watch out for:
Hacking. You should occasionally fetch your site as Googlebot so that you can see your site the way Google does. You could also view Google’s cache and then view as text only. Look for hiddent text, hidden links, redirects or any content that you didn’t put there. This kind of hack is difficult to discover because it’s designed to only been seen by Google so you have to make an effort to check for it.
I have personally seen these hacks on many dozens of websites that I was hired to fix. The most common problem was an established website making an upgrade to a content manager. Instead of buying an expensive template or having a custom template built they went with a free or cheap template. Often, especially with the free products, there is hidden code that contains links to casinos or pharma sites. It’s usually a quick find, but a long fix.
Check your robots.txt file to make sure you are not inadvertently blocking important files or directories. This happens more often than you think.
WordPress – First, I love WordPress. Unfortunately, there is a checkbox for blocking all search engines. I have no idea why it’s there, but it is and some people accidentally check it and *poof*. Their site disappears from the search engines.
If you have user generated content (UGC) from a blog or forum you need to closely watch any outbound links. Users can drop links to bad neighborhoods that will eventually get you in trouble.
There are many more ways to get your site in trouble (building backlinks improperly comes to mind), but these are some of the more popular.
Great article. digged
How does having multiple sites on the same IP hurt a website?
Thanks,
Jason
There is an old saying about websites that I like. You build the first one for show and the rest for dough.