Steering Clear of Search Engine Spam
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Everybody wants to show up on the first page of search engine results for their site’s chosen keywords. How you try to do it, however, can have exactly the opposite effect, getting you penalized or even banned from the search engines. This article will give you an overview of underhanded tactics that you might be practicing inadvertently.
The problem is, whether you’re doing it inadvertently or not, the results are the same: search engines ban you either temporarily or permanently. If a significant part of your online business model depends on traffic from the search engines, you’re in deep trouble. That’s especially true if the misbehavior you committed was particularly egregious; it could take months to convince a search engine that you’ve learned the error of your ways, repented, and fixed the problem.
On top of that, some of the tactics the search engines punish as spam are really standard tricks taken to extremes. Look at it this way: a little chocolate every so often can be a good thing; a lot of chocolate too often will make you pay a price for your indulgence. So how is a webmaster, site owner, or beginning and well-meaning SEO to know where the search engines draw the line?
As a starting point, all three of the most popular search engines include guidelines on their sites for webmasters looking to rank in the index and not get in trouble. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are the longest of the three search engines; if you’re specifically concerned with spam, you should scroll down to the quality guidelines, which include both general and specific suggestions. Yahoo!’s Search Content Quality Guidelines are shorter overall, but longer and very specific about what they don’t want to see in the sites they index. MSN’s Guidelines for Successful Indexing list only three things they don’t want to see, but these are fairly broad and general.
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