The Top Ten SEO Techniques and Page Design Elements that Will Get You Blacklisted from Google

The biggest search engine of them all is without a doubt Google. What they say goes, and most website owners just have to put up with it. It is always good to know what SEO techniques that Google will allow, but most of all, what they will not allow. They can blacklist your site for as long as they want, and you will never be able to get a high ranking again if you cross them once.

Knowing how important a great ranking is for your web site or blog site, here is a list of six SEO techniques you SHOULD NOT do for any reason:

1. YOUR WEB PAGE TEXT IS IN GRAPHICS FORM ONLY
Google considers "burying" text in your HTML code hides the text from their spiders that are trying to detect all of your relevant content. They feel this is manipulating their search engines and they don't like that one bit.

2. YOUR SITE HAS A BLACKLISTED WEB PAGE LINKED TO IT
A good rule of thumb regarding this issue is never to link to a "link farm" or a "Free for ALL" link page. These websites deal in every under-handed cheap trick they can find to bypass Google's strict submission rules, thereby bringing every other website linked to them down in the gutter. Make sure that all of your links lead Google and your site visitors to reputable pages at all times.

3. BAD LANGUAGE ON YOUR MAIN PAGES
This also includes using ethnic slurs of all types, as Google really looks down on racist sites that result in hate crimes or other controversial events.

4. LINK BUYING
Google really hates when you have to pay another site just to link with yours. If your site is worthy of being included in Google's main pages, why on earth would you have to buy a link? It does not make much sense from a business standpoint either, because you should put your promotion budget somewhere else entirely.

5. CLOAKING
When you present one web page to your readers and another page just for the spiders from Google to search for relevant keywords, this is known as "cloaking". If an SEO specialist says it's OK to do it his way, tell him firmly "No way!" and go with another SEO company that is more reputable.

6. YOUR SERVER IS DOWN DURING A GOOGLE SEARCH
You say that this is not your fault, but in a way it is. You cannot afford any down time as far as your main web pages are concerned, because that eats into your profits on a weekly basis if it happens too much. So always find the best server possible for your site, no matter the cost. And when Google sends out their spiders to your main pages for ranking purposes it is a HUGE error if your server is down and Google comes back with an error message. Big problem time!

7. ZERO LINKS Your website must have a least one back link coming in from a reputable website for Google to recognize you as worth their time. So before you submit your web pages, make sure you link to somebody first.

8. KEYWORD STUFFING
I went over this is another recent article, but it is a very important technique to remember to avoid. If Google thinks your pages are filled with certain keywords that you have included over 10% in the content's overall body, you will be heavily penalized by Google for keyword stuffing that will be hard for your site to recover from.

9. COPYRIGHT VIOLATION
If somebody has reported your site as having stolen their exact wording on content pages, or have accused your website of stealing images and graphics from their own pages, Google will come after you and make sure that you eliminate the text and images from your site immediately. But just to make sure that Google never has to do this, ALWAYS refrain from plagiarizing anybody else's website for any reason whatsoever.

10. USAGE OF FLASH PAGE AS MAIN PAGE
If you really want to make your visitors pay attention to your main page, just get creative with an animated logo or put some very nice HTML coding on your front page for some really nice graphics. In other words, use every other "flashy" technique to get a web surfers attention except for using a flash page. Google's spiders cannot read the text in a flash page, so Google thinks that you are manipulating that page for their search engine rankings.

Stay away from all of these SEO techniques and page re-designs and you should be OK in climbing up the much-coveted rankings of Google's main category web page.