While studying Tom Antion’s book, Click, The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Speakers, and his three-prong approach to Internet marketing, I came across a section on Google penalties and how to avoid them. The book describes five common penalties, the causes and what you can do to make sure your website isn’t penalized. Whether you are having a web designer create a new website for you or you have an existing website, arming yourself with this knowledge can prevent a lot of grief in the long run. It’s definitely a case of what you don’t know can hurt you.
The book cautions against the practices listed below:
- Linking to sites that are banned or penalized.
- Having dozens and dozens of new links coming to the exact same page over again with the same anchor text.
- Adding links to your site too fast.
- Running more than one site off a single IP address, and heavily cross linking those sites.
- Stuffing keywords into your website
- Piling up excessive reciprocal links, directory submissions, backlinks from unrelated or low-quality sites.
- Using too many links from sites that do not match your theme or industry niche.
- Using stagnant linking strategies, obvious over-optimization and just general neglect.
- Buying your way into the search results with paid links or link farm.
- Being heavy on AdSense but light in content.
- Using over optimization, poor or irrelevant link schemes and poor content.
To learn more about these common practices and the how to avoid the penalties Google imposes for using them, see http://www.antion.com/click.htm. If you would like to know more about designing your website using acceptable webmaster principles, visit http://imtcva.org/program/curriculum/.
