Earlier this week we wrote the seven golden rules of SEO. These were rules that you should follow for a successful SEO campaign. What if you don’t want successful SEO though? What if you want to get your website banned by Google?
Why would you want to do this? It sure beats us, but yet many websites and SEO companies engage in practices that seem akin to walking up to Sergey Brin and Larry Paige and slapping them across the face while wearing a T-Shirt sporting your URL. It’s as if these websites and SEO ‘professionals’ wanted to be banned by Google.
So, as so many people clearly want a good banning, here are just five sure fire ways to get your website banned by Google.
1 – Hide text on your website
The old trick of hiding text on your website is a dead cert to get your website banned. Text can be hidden in a variety of different, sneaky ways. Black Hat SEO companies are always coming up with new ways to hide text on websites. Techniques include:
- Making the text the same colour as the background
- Hiding the text with divs and CSS
- Positioning the text off the side of the screen with CSS
- Hiding the text behind images
Each one of those techniques is Black Hat and will get you banned if your website faces a manual review.
2 – Buy cheap links from poor quality sources
Buying links is never a good idea as Google frowns upon it. However, buying low quality links from shady sources is a great way to get your website the old Spanish Archer from Google. If your SEO company buys hundreds of links on irrelevant Polish websites, watch out!
3 – Steal content from other websites
Duplicate content is the scourge of the Internet, as anyone can copy and paste from other sources. Google hates it, and so do users of the Internet when they’re searching for information. This is why Google filters out the duplicates. If you make your website a duplicate of content that exists elsewhere, don’t get too attached to your Google traffic.
4 – Use multiple domains
This is an old trick that has long since lost its effectiveness. Webmasters would buy up dozens of keyword related domains and have their websites accessible through them all as they believed this would help their SEO. Some webmasters however still do this, and it’s hurting their profits and their rankings.
5 – Use doorway pages that redirect to other pages
This is another great technique for getting your website kicked out of Google. If you create loads of keyword focussed pages on your website, just for Google, and then redirect them to the real pages of your website (or even another website altogether) when the user accesses them then you’re sure to find your stay in Google’s index a short one.
Good luck using these techniques, as your eventual goal of getting booted out of the Google index should be within your grasp very soon.