subject: Antics That Can Tank Your Search Engine Rankings [print this page] There are a few no-nos that you need to be aware about so that you dont cause your rankings to plummet unexpectedly. You also want to know about these things so that you can protect yourself from attacks on your website by competitors (yes, it does happen).
Theoretically, if your link velocity is outrageous and you are building tens of thousands of SPAMMY backlinks to your site a day, that can hurt your rankings maybe. But chances are, you cant afford this and neither can your competitors. Even SPAM links cost money.
It is much more important to make sure you know where your outbound links are going. In fact, this is how the no-follow attribute got invented. Google does not like when your site links to bad neighborhoods. Therefore, if you have a place on your site where you are allowing the public to place links, you need to make sure that every link added has the no-follow tag placed on it. This can take some complicated programming, but it shouldnt be too hard. If youre using a blog, there are plugins that you can get that will automatically make all links in comments, no-follow. Or you can turn comments off if your blog is not interactive because otherwise it will just attract link SPAM anyway.
The next thing you dont want to do is anything Black-Hat, SPAMMY, or malicious. If you do certain tactics like cloaking under false pretenses, commit massive link SPAM (mentioned above), or do anything with the intent of harming a visitor or search engine user, Google is going to de-index your site eventually. And if your site is on a SPAMMY topic like Viagra, then dont expect to be a hit with human reviewers.
Also, it is considered bad practice to buy links from known link brokers. There is a difference between doing a Gray-Hat technique like placing links (by humans) on publicly viewable profiles and buying tens of thousands of links to be placed on link farms by robots. If Google can detect that youre doing this, they will either not pay attention to your links (waste of money) or de-index you (big waste of money).
Make sure that your site operates correctly 99.9% of the time. If your server has frequent downtime or is inaccessible to users, Google will not like that.
Dont keyword stuff or do stuffing of any time (except on Thanksgiving). This doesnt help rankings and if a human reviewer sees it, your site can de-indexed fast.
Dont put text of the same color as the background on the site. This is shady and normally these tactics do not help rankings. Again, if Google finds out, they will most likely penalize you.
Follow these rules and protect yourself against attacks and you will most likely not run into any de-indexing problems.
