The God of search engine loves you, but there are few things which can displease it.
When you stop following its commandments, you give an open challenge to its powers and invite its wrath. The reprimand could be anything, ouster from the heaven of appearing high in its SERP or complete blackout from its kingdom of search. What are those things, which displeases Google. Lets try and understand them below.
1. Paid Links : A big red flag. Paid means direct confrontation with the Big daddy. You can certainly add paid link but, you can not hide it. Make it clear that it is paid. Use words like sponsor, advertisement and add "no follow" tag so that you help Google identify between a paid link and a natural one.
2. Substandard Content : Content which doesn't do any value addition to the users and has been written just for Google's spider bots is simply unacceptable. Content written specifically for Search Engines will fail miserably and Google's panda update will ensure, you loose all your traffic benefits.
3. Low quality Link Building : Link building is an art which should take place, in its due course of time. If you take the easy way out of creating artificial links you will end up with nothing more than thousands of useless backlinks.
Search Engine land recently reported that “Many people have reported getting messages from Google regarding link violations. E.g. "Dear site owner or webmaster of …. We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."
That makes it clear, you need to rebuild your strategy for link building and focus only on high quality backlinks.
4. Attempts to Manipulate its Algorithm : It sounds tempting, but don’t even think about it. Google’s algorithm is its holy grail and will not tolerate any attempts to tamper it. Many search engine optimizers invest a lot of time trying to figure out how can they influence and manipulate the ranking signals. However, sooner or later Google gets to sniff that and then what once looked like a smart move ends up becoming a terrible mistake forever.
5. Duplicate Content : Wikipedia says - “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” Make sure your site doesn't have any duplicate or unoriginal content. In addition to it, you can use Canonical Link to clean up duplicate urls on your site.
6. Keyword stuffing : That used to be stone age practice , don't do it in the star war age. Instead of benefiting from it, you will end up getting penalized. Keep the keyword density reasonable, don't overdo it, unless you give a damn to Google and its ranking factors.
7. Broken links : Log in to your webmasters tools account and look out for every possible thing that you need to fix. This could include, broken links, duplicate metas, possible malware, site load time issues and so on. These are the basics for any seo and such errors make your site appear highly unprofessional.
8. Hidden text : If it's something of relevance or legitimate, then why is it hidden? That is the question spider bot asks. Its hidden because you want to game Google by stuffing keyword or some code which could help you manipulate its ranking signal.The moment you are caught, your ranking goes for a toss and your site goes into hiding too.
9. Old content : Your website was launched with a terrific design and rock solid content. But that was, quite a while ago. In addition to it, it hasn't been updated ever since then. Take a look at your keyword ranking, I am sure they too would have dropped too unimaginable levels. Yes, a website isn't that kind of job which you can do it once and then sit back and relax, for the rest of your life. you need to update it on a regular basis. Off late, Google has been emphasizing a lot on high quality fresh content, so if you intend to remain in the race you need to keep updating your content every now and then.
10. Too many Ads : Agreed that advertisement are your bread and butter, but, too many ads and too little content is a sure shot recipe for disaster. Google has already initiated a crackdown on those sites which are merely acting as cloning front for affiliates. Google wants you to educate your potential customers about a product and not just produce, another page full of banner ads, links and promotional content repeated over and over again across hundreds of affiliate partners.
In short, as a webmaster, it is your duty to ensure you avoid committing the above mentioned cardinal sins and help your site rank high only by legitimate ways of doing so.
