Google Penalties and How To Avoid Them - What Activities can Result in a Google Penalty?
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A penalty can be invoked by Google for violations of its search engine Terms of Service
http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html. As a service and a guide to webmasters in the proper development of websites, Google provides a Google Information For Webmasters page
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. The guidelines set out by Google provide web developers with many explicit rules that are meant to be followed.
Within Google's webmaster guidelines are some very specific don'ts.
The overall theme of Google's webmaster guidelines is to not attempt to trick the search engines. With that in mind, they provide a list of strong suggestions.
One major reason for being assessed a Google penalty is engaging in schemes to increase your site's position in the search engine results and for raising your PageRank. The avoidance of what Google calls "link spammers" and "bad neighborhoods".
Link Farms
The main culprits of this problem are the so-called "link farms". A link farm exists solely to increase PageRank by requiring the exchange of links between themselves and otherwise entirely unrelated websites. Should one of them, unknown to you, link to your site, Google won't penalize you for that. They believe you have no real control who links to your site.
On the other hand, Google feels you have complete control as to where you point your own links. Should you link your site to a link farm, clearly with the goal of increasing your PageRank and link popularity, Google will most likely respond negatively to your action. Google uses the "does it help your visitors, and if search engines didn't exist, would you still do it" test. That seems a reasonable test to ask yourself for any activity you use for your own website.
Hidden Text
Google specifically tells you not to use "hidden text" or "hidden links". It also disapproves of "cloaking" and "sneaky redirects". Hidden text is usually in the form of keywords, written very small, usually in the same color as the web page, or both. The idea is to have the text read by the search engine spider, but not by the site visitor. Hidden links are sent out to other sites, but not seen by the visitor. They are often used as a trick in link exchanges, to prevent visitors leaving the site, once there. Sneaky redirects send a web surfer to a different web site entirely from the one intended. These are often used in affiliate programs.
Other Don'ts from Google
Google disapproves of unauthorized computerized and automated programs for page and site submissions and for checking search rankings. The guidelines specifically mention the avoidance of the popular web tool Web Position Gold (TM). Because these programs utilize a large amount of computing time and space, they are a violation of the terms of service. For that reason, automated queries are banned.
Heavy use of keywords, that clearly do not belong in the context of the web page, are strongly discouraged as well. They are clearly an attempt to rank well for search terms that have nothing to do with the website, except to steer traffic to the site from irrelevant search results. For example, filling web pages with the most popular search terms, when none of them have anything to do with your site content, would fall under that category.
Duplicate content, whether pages or entire websites is specifically against the prescribed guidelines. Identical pages are used to add more pages of content and perhaps to have more results appear for searches. The Google algorithm attempts to avoid indexing identical pages and duplicate sites by indexing only one.
The so-called "doorway" pages, that are packed with every imaginable keyword to attract the search query, and then steer that traffic via a "sneaky redirect" to another site are expressly forbidden. Often used by affiliate programs, to avoid providing additional useful content, these techniques often lead to penalties from Google.
There are many more techniques that search engine spammers employ, that Google is attempting to stop in their tracks. While the methods are not specifically named, Google reserves the right to change its algorithm to combat them as they arise. The goal of the search engine is to provide the best and most relevant results possible. The inclusion of spam type websites prevents good webmasters from getting their honest sites as high in the results as they deserve.
Next: What Can you do about Search Engine Spam? >>
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