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2007-08-17 -- If you want Google to rank your website highly, you must avoid all appearances of spam.
Many webmasters unknowingly promote their websites with methods that Google regards as spammy. It's easy to fall into such a trap, because technology allows us to automate and speed up the process of doing things to promote our websites, and not all these things seem to hurt anybody as ordinary email spam does.
But any action you take that substitutes automation for the efforts of a human being, makes you and your website suspicious to Google. Rightly or wrongly, they regard all such automation as subject to abuse. So it can get you banned, your Page Rank reduced to 0 or your pages exiled to their Supplemental results.
Here are some spam flags to avoid:
1. All the usual on-page black hat SEO techniques. Most people today know to avoid most of them: invisible text, hidden images, keywords stuffed metatags and so on. Don't use automated web page generation software. Cloaking is one which is still is still in widespread use. But Google is working hard to detect and ban sites using it.
2. Spam blogs or splogs. You can buy software which can create up to 10,000 blogs, post some keywords of "content," create links back to your website, and then ping the blog directories. Google owns Blogger and actively patrols it for blogs it deems suspicious. Google can't take down blogs hosted on other servers, but it can and does ban sites linked to by splogs. Google is not stupid. It knows that a site with a one-month old domain is not going to be written about by 10,000 people on brand-new blogs.
3. Duplicate content. This is an easy trap to fall into, because many people have been promoting their sites by writing articles and getting them published on many different websites. Keep your own website content all-original. Don't even reprint your own promotional articles that you submit to article directories or other websites.
4. Any large, sudden surge of links to your site. Yes, links to your site are good things, and Google likes them and uses them to increase your Page Rank. But Google also believes that it takes time for other webmasters to find, notice and link to the content pages on your site. If this month your site has no links and next month is has 1000 -- that's not natural. And Google knows it. You've been doing something spammy.
5. Any large, sudden surge of pages on your site. Yes, useful or entertaining content is good. Google loves it, but Google also knows that you can write only so many words a day. If your site has only 10 pages this month, but 10,000 next month, Google knows you didn't write them all.
So even if you obtained that content through legitimate outsourcing, don't upload it to your site all at once. Add only 10 to 20 pages a week.
Some of these spam flags may seem unreasonably restrictive. Unfortunately, there're many webmasters who make these rules necessary by abusing the system any way they can.
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