Don't Get Banned by Google

By Mike Ralph

There are many Black Hat techniques that people use to try and influence Googles ranking of their sites, the simple thing to remember is that they do not help your rankings, are simply a waste of your time and sooner or later will lead to a Google ban for your site. Sure there are sites that use these techniques and are getting away with it but they will eventually get penalized as Google always manages to find them eventually.

As I said please avoid using these techniques :

Alt Image Tag Stuffing
This is a way that webmasters try to 'force fill' keywords into their website, thus the search engines can see these keywords and their site visitors see no difference at all to layout and an excessive use of certain words.

What happens is that webmasters insert graphic's that relate to their subject and then add an alt image tag to it. The search engines see this but a visitor will only see it if they hover over the graphic and a pop up will appear.

What you tend to find is that mis-informed webmasters add multiple instances of the keywords that they are targeting with a view to increasing key word density when the search bots visit the page.

The real purpose of an alt image tag is if the web site graphic doesn't load then the text will appear instead of the graphic, this is particularly important if a visually impaired visitor gets to your site.

My advice would be to keep it simple, use your keyword once and use the tags to present an accurate description of the graphic.

Hidden Text
Hidden Text is simply text that visitors to your site cannot see when they visit your webpage(s). Its used for the same reasons as described in the alt tag example. All that is involved is the webmaster adds the text (usually keyword spam) to the page in the same colour as the background and as such it becomes invisible to the human eye but gets picked up by the search engine bots.

Meta Tag Stuffing
Meta Tags are vital parts of the make up of a web page but again abusing them with a view to influencing the search engine bots can cause you problems. Basically the keyword tag is loaded with hundreds, even thousands, of the exact same keyword into the tag. For example, the targeted keyword is DVD and the meta tag looks like:

< META NAME = "KEYWORDS" CONTENT="DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD, DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD, DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD, DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD" >

The important thing to remember is that Google does not use this tag to rank your page due to wide scale abuse so why bother, it is also a pretty ridiculous thing to do.

Title Tag Stuffing
The same principle as above but using the title tag, use your keyword once in the title and make it an accurate description of the page and its content that is sufficient.

If you have to resort to black hat techniques then the set up of your site is wrong and they will eventually lead to the site being penalized. Its a pure waste of effort, they don't work and could kill your site.

Mike - Webmaster and eBay Power Seller at Online Auction Trader

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