Should You Be Worried About Being Banned?

The SEO world is full of speculation, conjecture and educated best guesses. It's not surprising then, that the average webmaster/site owner can find the whole business of SEO overwhelming and intimidating. After all, the success of a site can, in most cases, be measured in page views. Not showing up, or even worse, being banned from a major search engine isn't going to do a lot for your business.

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Discuss This Topic at Google on submitting. Google on SEO Yahoo's crawler More Yahoo on SPAM Clearly some of the things you read on the above linked pages are going to be subjective. Overall however, good judgment and a little common sense will go a long way in your promotion endeavors. If, for example, you have 300 words on an entire page and 290 of them are free download', you should probably reconsider that page. Don't try to fool' search engines with tricks like text/background color similarities (i.e. keywords in black text on black background) either. Most all search engines frown upon gateway-type pages. That being said, not all gateways are created equally. You can have a page that serves essentially the same purpose of the bad gateway; only give it some meaningful content. Don't duplicate content, don't repeat key phrases/keywords nonstop, and don't make 3,000 of them and you should be fine. Overall, if you follow the basic guidelines you shouldn't have to worry about ever being banned from any search engine. As long as you avoid the things like link farms, spammed gateways, duplicated content, sneaky server-side stuff like cloaking (serving search engine spiders a different page than your normal visitors see) you should have little to fear as far as banning goes. If you are considering hiring someone to take care of your SEO, ask to see some examples of what they have done in the past and ask questions about their plans for your site. In order to be banned, you are generally going to have to do one of two things. Either trigger some sort of programmatic threshold (i.e. link farming or spammy gateway pages), or receive a number of complaints from users. Otherwise most people have nothing at all to worry about. Mike is a manager at Murdok. He has been with Murdok since 2000.