Top 5 Ways to Get Your Site Banned From the Search Engines

Getting your site ranked high for your main keywords is an absolute must if you are serious about developing a profitable online business. There are many steps you need to make in order to achieve those top rankings and in the process many developers make critical mistakes that some are even unaware of, that get their site banned from Google and other search engines.

I'm presenting to you here the top 5 practices that will get your site banned in the hope that you will avoid using them.

1. Keyword stuffing

As you should know, having a good keyword density on your content pages is highly beneficial as it will help your search engine rankings. However, over doing it by stuffing your main keywords all over your articles, in title tags, in outbound links etc will surely get your site banned. If your keyword density reaches 10% on any given page then you are taking a high risk - it is recommended that the keyword density be kept around 5%.

2. Linking to link farms and other suspicious/low-quality sites

Google considers every outgoing link from your site as a vote of relevance and quality for that particular site. If you exchange links with a link-farm type site that will get you banned from most search engines, not just Google. You will also get banned if you provide links to sites that promote pornography, violence, racism, hacking, cracking, gambling, prescription pills etc or sites that for one reason or the other are already banned from the SE's. It is highly recommended to check your link partners on a regular basis or it may harm your business.

3. Illegal/Duplicate Content

We all know that content is King as far as the internet is concerned. Having freshly written top quality content on a regular basis will help your site and your rankings flourish. However, using someone else's copyrighted content on your sites will likely get you not just banned from the search engines, but in serious legal trouble as well. Using articles already published on other sites can harm you to a lesser degree, mostly if that article is old and has already been published on thousands of sites. Article directories however aren't usually affected as all their content is submitted by original authors on a regular basis.

4. Invisible text

Some webmasters try to fool search engine spiders by adding invisible text - that has the same color as the site background - in an effort to raise the keyword density. While this technique used to work in the "old days" of the internet, search engines spiders have become a lot smarter and this sort of "black-hat" technique will get you banned.

5. Cloaking

Cloaking is another "black-hat" technique that involves content separation, meaning the spiders see one highly optimized page while you and I see something completely different, usually different types of promotions. Just another powerful way to get your site out of major search engine rankings, so make sure to avoid this one too.

So there you have it, 5 great ways to get your site kicked out of Google and any other decent search engine out there - hope you'll use this information wisely.