Ways to Get Blacklisted

The principle behind search engine indexing is to provide the most accurate results possible in response to search queries received. Some people feel the need to exploit search engines’ services. While some search engines may temporarily oversee some spamming tactics, these techniques will likely get your site blacklisted for life.

One of the earliest and most pervasive methods of spamming involved stuffing meta tags with popular keywords, but had little or no relevance to the actual site content. This tactic was great for generating untargeted traffic, but extremely frustrating for searchers since search results would display listings having nothing in common with the original query. This form of spamming was so abused that some of the major search engines have largely abandoned the use of meta tags in calculating relevancy of a given search. Of course, it didn’t take long before people came up with equally inventive methods for circumventing such solutions and so the cycle goes on.

Search Engines Strike Back

What’s a search engine to do? Remember, the holy grail of search engine indexing is to provide searchers with the most accurate results possible. With all the tricks people pull to try to trick search engines services, it is no wonder that the search engines are striking back. Sure, some tricks may provide high rankings for a short period of time, but the downside is a permanent banning of your domain name or worse yet, having to transfer your site to another host. If the abuse is severe, this could even result in a partial IP ban.

Meta tags have been reduced to one element among many as the basis for serving up accurate results. Keywords are still considered but only in their relationship to other elements, such as titles, link text, header tags, and page text, to name a few. Just because Meta tags are no longer the focus for determining relevancy, doesn’t mean that engaging in keyword stuffing won’t get your site banned. While standards and algorithms vary amongst indexes the safest use of keywords involves using no more than three instances of a given word within a Meta tag.

The idea is that if certain elements like text and images cannot be observed by a human visitor, but can by a search engine spider, or showing one page to a spider and another to a human visitor, then it’s largely considered deceitful. This is not an ethical claim so much as clarifying how a spider indexes a page. If body text uses the same color as background text, also known as “invisible text”, (a common method of keyword stuffing) this will most assuredly get your site banned within a short period of time, if it even gets indexed at all. Another trick using text involves superscript whereby a browser instructed to render text, which is so small it can’t be seen by the eye.

The same holds true for using images of a certain size, such as one pixel by one pixel in dimension. An image that size isn’t intended for a human visitor but rather for a spider, typically as a link to a “crawl page” whereby each page of the site is plainly listed for the spider to crawl and index. Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, however, as this idea can be readily abused and has no influence on a person’s visit, some spiders may see such a tactic as a demarcation of validity as regards to the content of that site.

Trust is the essential bridge between the end user and the results offered by a search engine. A doorway page may provide information to a spider but obscure it from an observer. There a variety of legitimate reasons to do this but the danger lies in presenting false information to a visitor; therefore if a doorway page claims one thing and then brings the visitor to another page which contradicts the first then that site will probably get banned if not have their search ranking reduced. Doorway pages are a legitimate tool, if they provide relevant and unique content.

Once certain design issues are settled, the question of submission standards comes into play. Whether or not an individual supersedes these standards intentionally or accidentally – a common mistake – search engines will usually consider such a breach as spam. While procedures vary between engines, there are some common features between them, which are similar enough that an average between them is easy to maintain.
Typically only the index page of a site needs to be submitted, however some engines don’t object to having multiple pages submitted; it’s a good policy to submit only one page per day though no more than once per month. After submission, a spider from that engine will the crawl the site and catalogue everything it finds. Patience is necessary at this stage as, depending on the engine, anywhere from two to eight weeks may pass before your site gets crawled. Even if something on the site changes, it’s best to allow the search engine spiders to do their job and crawl your site again; whether you do anything or not this will occur about once per month and you won’t need to submit your site again once it’s indexed.