How Google Rankings are Hurt

Search Engines place a very strong emphasis on the quality and relevancy of their search results. Certain techniques will make it difficult or impossible for web pages to be recognized by search engines:

• Dynamic Pages whose contents are created in a database. Some engines will not index them

• Not having meta tags in the programming of a page that contain keywords or relevant titles

• Not having the meta tags that inclusively invite robots to index the site

• Not having a Sitemap for the website

When moving forward with a SEM campaign, it’s important to realize the following techniques will get a site banned from Search Engines or at the very least result in a Google Page Rank (PR) penalty.

• Submitting multiple URLs for the same site

• Cloaking - having two separate pages, one optimized for the search engines and a different one optimized for the viewer

• Doorway pages - home page loaded with keywords

• Hidden text - hidden keywords on a page and make the font color the same as the background color (for example white text on a white background)

• Hidden links - The number of pages that link to one of the pages has a direct effect on how high the page appears in the search results (and that page's PR). As with hiding text, hiding links will also result in a ban or PR penalty

• Link farms - A link farm is loosely defined as a page that lists links solely or mainly for the purpose of achieving a high Google PR. Free-For-All links pages are often considered link farms by Google

• Spamming - unsolicited commercial emails

• Selling PR - blatantly advertising the fact that a high PR site will sell a link to another site in order to boost that site's PR will result in both sites being banned

• Multiple identical sites - In order to increase PR, some webmasters will create and interlink multiple pages all with identical or very similar content. This is not allowed.

• Multiple domains - Creating multiple domains that redirect to one page is not allowed. Also, creating multiple domains with the same or nearly the same content and then interlinking them is a bad practice

• Excessive links - Google recommends having no more than 100 links on any given page. Having more than 100 links won't result in a ban but it can result in a lower PR