Is Your Site About to be Blacklisted?

As a relatively new marketing technique, SEO is still experiencing development of new ideas every day. With all the good ideas that have developed, there are also some ideas that are really, really bad.

With SEO, it can be hard to tell the good ideas from the bad ones. In a recent, extreme case, BMW's German website was entirely delisted from Google for an SEO tactic that someone on their marketing team probably thought was a good idea. How can you keep that from happening to your site?

One approach is to play it safe—do nothing with your website, and hope that it will get good rankings on its own. But your competition can take advantage of your inaction and leap ahead by implementing even a few good SEO techniques. And even if you think you're doing nothing with your website, you might already have made some critical mistakes that will seriously damage your rankings in the search engines.

The alternative is to work on improving your site. If you search online for tips, you'll run across all sorts of ideas. Read through the following list of tactics, and see if you know which are good and which are bad. (The answers are at the bottom of this article.)

Good Idea / Bad Idea

1. Buy multiple domain names with different keywords and point them all to your site.
2. Add unique meta-tags to every page on your site.
3. Increase the keyword density of your pages to 5 percent, 20 percent, or even 50 percent.
4. You can't get away with simple white text on a white background, but use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to mask the color and do the same thing.
5. Detect the search engine 'crawlers' and show them different, keyword-rich versions of your flash or other pages.
6. Put 'alt tags' on all of your images and other content.
7. Edit your robots.txt file to include a command to "index=all; revisit=daily."

These are just a few of many tactics that have been suggested as ways to increase your site's rankings on the search engines. One of the tactics listed above is the tactic that got BMW delisted from Google. Some of the others are pretty good ideas, and will help more people find and use your site.

The key is to work with the search engines, to present and identify useful, relevant content to your users and to the search engines. There are lots of good things you can do to help improve your rankings. A general rule of thumb: don't do anything that you wouldn't be comfortable explaining to a Google employee.

Don't let your employees do anything that will jeopardize your site, either. We've had more than one client come to 10x with multiple domains, all pointing to their main site. This can be okay, if the domains are set up properly, but they can also contribute to the search engines seeing your site as duplicate content. If no one is monitoring IT decisions on your website, technology changes and other actions can harm your visibility on the Web. A good SEO company will watch your rankings and your site to catch anything before it can do serious damage.

If you suspect you may already have made some mistakes, or your site has been penalized for any reason, don't despair! BMW was able to get back into Google, with some dedicated effort. We've helped several companies in similar situations clean up their problems and enjoy very high rankings.

Contact us today, and our SEO experts can survey your site and tell you if you're in any danger. If you have any questions about specific tactics, or you're wondering what you should be doing to increase your visibility on the Internet, give us a call!

1. Multiple domains are okay, if you've set them up properly—we can check that for you.
2. You should use meta tags to help search engines understand your site. A good SEO campaign should include unique tags on every page. We can help write them for you.
3. There may actually be a *best* keyword density number, but that would be one of the simplest things for Google to change in their next algorithm tweak. Don't focus on a specific keyword density; try to write good content that will help your users, and make sure to use the keywords where they make sense.
4. Bad idea. CSS won't fool search engines long, and it certainly won't fool a human checking up on the spam report your competitor filed against you last week.
5. Commonly called 'cloaking,' this is the one that got BMW. Clever idea, but it backfires spectacularly.
6. Alt tags are useful for content that search engines can't use otherwise, like images and even Flash movies.
7. The robots.txt file is one of the great myths in SEO. It has very limited application—but in the right place, it can be very helpful. The command in this question is a joke; please don't put that in your robots file.

To receive the WebVisibility newsletter every month, subscribe here:


*note: you may need to disable your pop-up blocker.