How to Avoid Getting Black-Listed by Google

As the largest search engine, Google has a lot of influence on people looking to get into Internet marketing. If you don’t want your website to get black listed from Google, then you have to play by their rules when getting back links. Since back links are one of the most critical parts of boosting your web site’s ranking in Google, a lot of people resort to link-building methods that aren’t allowed by Google. It’s very tempting to take that offer of 100 links for $99 but you get what you pay for and they won’t be links Google will like. This inevitably leads to having websites get black listed for not following Google’s SEO guidelines. Here we’re going to look at what some of those bad link-building methods are, what getting black listed from Google means for your website, how to get a site unbanned from Google, and good ways to build back links.

One common form of automated back link building that’s not allowed by Google is building links through the use of automated content farms. Imagine a group of blogs automatically stealing content from other websites all over the Internet, and then using thousands of pages of that stolen content to build back links to their main websites. This schemes are often called blog farms, and are strictly not allowed by Google. Many of the links you can buy on the internet come from these types of websites and they can often have a very quick result in getting good rankings. Virtually always, however, Google finds them and black lists them along with all the links on the site so your new found rankings will soon disappear.

When a newcomer to Internet marketing asks about easy ways to build links, they are almost always told that they should do blog commenting. These are those little comments you find below articles on blogs where people start discussing the topic they have just read. Unfortunately, a lot of people take this to mean that they should post comments on blog posts that add no value to the page, or relevance to the topic and just stick their link at the end of the comment they leave. Google’s biggest problem with this type of link-building isn’t that you are commenting for links, but instead that you are not adding quality comments to links. If you do enough of this, you can get your pages in trouble as the main blog engines like WordPress or Moveable Type have reporting systems in place to spot this and report it.

A few common buzzwords lately in the Internet marketing and SEO world are “link wheels” and “link pyramids”. These linking schemes work by setting up a collection of dummy sites, usually web 2.0 sites, and linking them together in a way that boosts the ranking of your main website. Many SEO companies adopted this technique and some still use it today. What a lot of people don’t realize is that these linking schemes are specifically not allowed by Google because they are artificially manipulating the search engine results. Always check what an SEO company is doing when you employ them to build links for your website.

When you are banned from Google, that means your site is no longer listed in their search results, known as the index. Without being listed in the index, you can get no traffic from Google, and no traffic means no money. Because Google is such a large, well-known search engine, getting cut off from Google traffic can severely damage the profitability of a website and even put a company out of business. There are many website out there that do no marketing at all and just survive off the traffic they receive from Google. The process of getting unbanned from Google is pretty straight-forward but can take a long time and you are certainly not guaranteed to get back the rankings you had before you got banned. First, you must stop doing all of the shady SEO and link-building tactics, like those described above. Next, you’ll need to add more high-quality content to your website that adds value and makes the website something a user could actually benefit from and enjoy using. Once you have done this you can get yourself considered for inclusion in Googles index again using Google Webmaster Tools. Bear in mind if you have been banned Google will likely be in no hurry to include you again so patience will be required.