How to avoid getting banned by Google

If you wake up and find one day that your website isn’t showing anymore in Google, you have been a victim of a Google Ban. This is the worst thing that can happen to your website, especially if you are running a business through your site. Several factors can trigger a Google Ban. Here is a list of ways you can keep your website on Google’s good side.

1. Make sure your have the best up-time possible for your website. This means you must have reliable web hosting. If Google visits your website and it is not up, you may risk Google banning you site.

2. Do not use spamming techniques to promote your website. This will almost definitely lead to condemnation of your website for at least 6 months. Never use “black hat” methods like doorways, hidden text or cloaking. You are only setting yourself up for disaster.

3. Make sure your content is original and relevant. Websites that duplicate content are punished with lower rankings and even bans. Your content should always be made for human consumption and relate to your website’s theme.

4. Linking is a two way street. Not only should the links going out of your website be quality, but be certain that the links that lead to your website are from Google respected locations as well. Avoid link farms and any paid linking service. Also, excessive linking is a red flag for Google. When you add internal links on your own sites, make sure you do it in moderation and with purposeful intent.

5. Be sure your site is Google friendly. Build your website so that Google is able to index every page. Include a sitemap. Be sure all your pages are working and that there are no broken links.

If you follow the Google “Tips for Optimizing” you will be fine. Don’t try to fool Google with tricky tactics. The price you will pay is far worse than the effort it takes to do things the right way!

Brad

Free HTML to RSS Converters

There are many free online websites out there that will convert your HTML page to an RSS feed URL. But why would  you want to do such a thing?

That’s a good question.

Having an RSS feed on your website will allow your visitors to subscribe to your news feed (or blog feed or article feed etc). This allows your visitors who regularly use an RSS News Reader (there are many free RSS readers out there) to collect RSS feeds of interest and read all their (combined) headlines in the one place. Then if anything catches their eye they can click on the link and view the complete original article (including pictures, audio and video – if any).

RSS News Readers have become a very useful time saver. Many business (and non-business) people open their RSS Reader first thing in the morning on the bus or train or when they arrive at work (even before reading their email) to catch a quick glimpse of the topics they are most interested in (yes, there are RSS Readers for your mobile phone, smart phone, iPhone and PDA).

So if a visitor to your website wants to receive just the news headlines from your web page in the packaged convenience of their RSS Reader application, and you don’t have an RSS feed to offer them, then they may just click right past your website and never come back.

Now of course, if you don’t have the expertise to create your own RSS feed (which requires writing web code to produce the specially constructed XML format file the RSS Readers consume), then the next best thing is to convert your HTML page to an RSS feed URL and place a link to this feed on your web page.

Here is a list of some free html2rss web services I’ve used:

http://html2rss.com
Easy to use.  Allows you to create your own account with backlinks (which is great for SEO purposes). Provides for the conversion of single HTML documents to an RSS feed (extracting wither the articles it finds or the links). Support for converting multiple HTML URLS or RSS feeds into the one RSS feed (often called a “machup”). Resulting RSS feed can be a snippets from your HTML page or just the links. The downside to html2rss.com is not all the links in the HTML document you present are converted into the resulting RSS feed file (so if you’re worried about maximising your backlinks when feeding your RSS into the aggregators then try another service).

http://www.feedage.com/html2rss/
Creates an RSS 2.0 format feed from your HTML page. You can’t create your own account. There is a bulk conversion tool (http://www.feedage.com/html2rss/bulk_html2rss.php). Fails to convert all links in your HTML document (not all of the links on the HTML page can be found in the resulting RSS feed – so if you’re worried about maximising your backlinks then try another service).

http://balluche.free.fr/html2rss
Doesn’t miss any of your links in the HTML page. Provides a useful filter so you can only include certain content from your HTML page into the resulting RSS feed URL. Includes the ability to convert images (not just HTML) into an RSS XML file. The downside is Balluche produces awfully long RSS Feed URLs (ugh!). Luckily you can convert these using Balluche Blink or tinyurl.com or a myriad of other free URL shortening services.

The downside of converting your HTML page (or pages) to an RSS feed is that you don’t have control over exactly what information goes into the resulting RSS feed, and the conversion (from HTML to RSS) is a once-off process … if your HTML web page changes you’ll need to recreate the RSS feed so the new information is included.

And of course, because these are free serives, they will usually attach a link to their own website as the last link in the RSS file.

But when you need a quick RSS feed, these html2rss converters offer a quick and practical solution, even if it’s a temporary one until you can implement your own real-time, dynamic, automated RSS feed.

Should you include your keyword in your domain name?

There seems to be some confusion for some people out there (individuals, business owners, employees and consultants like Search Engine Optimisers) as to whether you should include your main keyword in your domain name.

For example, if my main keyword I want to rank for in the search engines is “serp tracking”, should I be using a domain like serptracking.com?

The quick answer in my opinion is “Yes, if you can.”, but it’s not imperative. Having your keyword phrase in your domain name is just one “piece of the SEO pie”. There are dozens and dozens of important (and less important) factors that affect how well your website will rank (including title tag, text, internal linking, number and quality of backlinks, and so much more). Off-site SEO (aka backlinking) is, in my opinion, the best way of achieving a high ranking – far more important than on-site SEO (on-site SEO is also important, but not as important).

View my post backlinks: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask!

Ok now, consider this: Adobe is #1 out of 1+ billion results for the keyword phrase “click here.”  Why? Largely because of off-page factors, not because “click here” is in their domain name.

Click here to see for yourself (link will open up in a new browser window).

From the Google website: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

So having your main keyword (or any keyword that you want to use) in your domain name isn’t really important. So why do I say “Yes, if you can.”? Because not everyone is willing to put in a considerable amount of effort (namely into backlinking) over months and years to make it unnecessary!

However, we all need whatever SEO help we can get in the early days. So try and select a domain name that reflects your main keyword. Preferably in the .com or .net space as Google.com has a slight preference (IMHO) when indexing for these domains (unless you are providing a country specific product or service, then buy a domain in your country space eg. serptracking.com.au for Australia).

If you domain name isn’t available, then try variations, like serp-tracking.com, serp-tracking-software.com, etc.

What happens if you’ve already got a domain? Try subdomaining! Costs you nothing and you can create as many subdomains as you want. For example you could go for serptracking.mydomain.com

So in summary, if my main keyword phrase is serp tracking, then:

1. For brand new domains, try and get one that reflects your main keyword (eg. serptracking.com).
2. For older domains, either use friendly URLs (eg. http://mydomain.com/products/serp-tracking-software.html), or create a subdomain (eg. http://serptracking.mydomain.com)
3. Ensure your HTML <title> tag reflects your main keyword phrase.
4. Backlink the hell out of your domain! But be sure to use white-hat techniques and link from authoritative/quality websites.

Backlinks: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask!

What are backlinks?

Before we talk about Back Links, let’s quickly discuss Forward Links (or Hyperlinks). These are the links on your website that either:

• link to other pages (or documents eg. images, videos, audio files, PDFs etc are all considered ‘documents’) within your website (internal links)
• or link to pages (or documents) on other websites (external links).

In the HTML markup language these links look like this:

<a href=”/contact_us.html”>Contact Us</a>
this points, or links, to a page within your own website

<a href=”http://www.google.com”>Google Website</a>
this points to someone else’s website – google.com in this example

Back Links (or more commonly written as Backlinks) are the opposite of Forward Links.

Backlinks (or Incoming Back Links (IBL) or inbound links or off-site links) are links from other websites to one of your web pages. In the 2nd example above, you are providing google.com with a backlink (a link from your site to theirs).

Why backlink?

Search Engines count the number of backlinks your website has pointing to it as part of it’s own process (ranking) to determine how popular or important your website is. The more backlinks you have pointing to your website, the more “important” the search engines think your website is.

In the “old days” this simple strategy was very effective in getting your website ranked well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, search engines (especially Google) have become a lot smarter and wiser, and now the “quality” and “relevance” of the site backlinking to your site plays a significant part in the ranking process.  For example, if the website backlinking to you has a high ranking itself, then this link from them to you is seen as a “vote of confidence” by some search engines (eg. Google), and will help improve your overall ranking.

How do I create backlinks?

Common methods used for obtaining links to your site include (but are not limited to):

• Sending a press release to online PR sites.
• Sending an article (with a link to your site) to article submission sites.
• Submiting your site to relevant online directories.
• Joining forums that are relevant to the content of your site, put a link to your site in the signature area, and submit on-topic comments to the site.

Another method of increasing back links is by paying for them on other sites. Many search engines, in particular Google, strongly frown on this method of gaining links.

How do I know what backlinks are “out there” pointing back at me?

You can conduct “special” searches in most search engines that will list all the sites it has indexed that have a link back to your site. Most of the engines also provide the ability to filter out (remove from the results) any links that come from your own website.

Google Example

Google provides the link: prefix to a search query. Using this prefix will (supposedly) list all the web pages it has indexed that have a link to your website (including your own web pages pointing to other web pages in your site). Now, I say “supposedly” because Google doesn’t list no where near the number of backlinks pointing to your site. There are several reasons mentioned by “those in the know”, including Google not wanting people to (partly) reverse engineer it’s ranking algorithm (which is apparently largely tied to the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your site). Regardless of the reason, the link: prefix will basically get you no where.

Here’s a screen shot of a backlink query for my own website http://serptracker.markread.com.au (click on any of the following images for a larger view).

google backlinks to serp tracker

Hmmm … only 2 backlinks (and one of them is from my own website)!!  But I know there are a lot more! Not only did I create them, but Google has increased my ranking based on them (and certainly not just based on the 2 shown in the link: report!!)

The problem with Google’s link: prefix (as of the date of this posting) is that it doesn’t show you all of the backlinks Google has indexed that are pointing to your site (don’t ask me why). We need to coerce it a little. A better query is @serptracker.markread.com.au This produces the following results:

Improved backlink Google query

Ok, 148 results. That’s better! But some of them are my web pages pointing back at my site. Let’s remove them so we only see other websites backlinking to me.

We do this by excluding our website from the query, like this:

@serptracker.markread.com.au -site:serptracker.markread.com.au

Now we get a set of results like so:

Final Google Backlink Query

Of course, Google isn’t the only search engine in town that can show you a backlink report (although Google does currently have the lions share of the market – refer to the article comparing organic clicks vs ppc clicks for more interesting statistics). You should ideally obtain a backlink report from the top 3 search engines as a minimum (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and combine them all together (into a spreadsheet for example).

View all Google Search Operators

Yahoo Example

Yahoo backlink report example for SERPtracker

Here is a list of typical backlink search queries for several popular search engines. The domain name I’m searching for in these examples is serptracker.markread.com.au:

Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&filter=0

Yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt

Here’s a refinement. For more extensive results, try this search in the Yahoo search box:

linkdomain:serptracker.markread.com.au -site:serptracker.markread.com.au

The above search includes links to ALL pages on your site, not just the main page.

MSN
http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&FORM=MSNH&v=1&q=linkdomain:serptracker.markread.com.au

AllTheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf-8&q=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&_sb_lang=any

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q=link%3Aserptracker.markread.com.au&kgs=0&kls=0&avkw=qtrp

There are also several free website services and tools that will produce a list of your backlinks from one or more search engines (some more accurately than others I might add). The commercial products generally offer the most comprehensive reports.

Here’s a few free sites I know of:

• http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
• http://www.backlinkfinder.com
• http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm

Getting quality backlinks will improve your website ranking in the search engines, but only if the backlinks remain in place. Articles, blogs, image banners and even whole domains do sometimes get deleted (by accident or otherwise). If you have a lot of these backlinks disappear you’ll notice your website will dip (sometimes dramatically) in the SERPs. So you’ll want to create quality backlinks to your site from time to time.

How can I measure my website ranking?

The manual method is by conducting a search of your website in the various search engines. The listing produced is called a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Typically a search engine query will produce many SERPs that you can look through to find the position (rank) of your website.

Google SERPs for SERP Tracker (3 Aug 2009)

The screenshot above shows a typical Google search. You enter the keyword to search on, click on the Search button, then pages and pages of listings are returned. You’ll then need to look through these pages one by one, counting as you go, until you find your website referenced. This can be a very slow and laborious process, especially if your website is near the end of the SERPs (Google will return up to 1000 listings).

If you do this process regularly (for your own business or for your boss as part of your job role), you may want to take a look at an automated tool designed to record the ranking of your website over a period of time, like SERPtracker. This SERP tracking tool has been purposely built with one objective in mind; to historically track the ranking of your website in the Google SERPs.

Other resources

I hope this post has clarified some of the confusion surrounding the backlink topic. It is not meant as a definitive essay on the subject. Other resources you might want to look at include:

• Wikipedia