What factors will get you banned with Google?

Google penalizes blogs and sites for a number of reasons. John Chow is the recent victim. He was taken off the google index recently for doing something that violated Google webmaster guidelines.

John had been running his “Link to me – to get linked back” scheme, whereby if you write a small review on his blog and link to him with the anchor text,”Make money online”, he would link back to you. Many bloggers linked to him and got linked back from John.

Now that John Chow is kicked out of Google Index, what does it mean to other bloggers who have linked to him?

Google says it clearly in it’s guidelines that -

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

So that means anyone who linked to John Chow is going to get the penalty this Google PR update. Yikes! Are you one of those?

Does it affect John Chow?

Nope. The man had made the blog hugely popular and enjoys a steady source of traffic.He’s even declared that banning from Google has done no detrimental effects on his income.

Does it affect you?

If you’ve linked to John, and he’s linked back – well yes may be. Only this Google PR update will tell you.

So what are the things that I shouldn’t do to get a bad reputation with Google?

Yeah, the guidelines are a bit boring to read through. so let’s me list out the most overlooked things by most of the people.

1. Choose a good server that has no downtime – Google does not like servers that has frequent downtimes. Worse – when the Google bots visit your site, if your server is down, they flag you red!
2. Don’t do those black hat SEO stuff like keyword stemming, cloaking, doorway pages etc.
3. Don’t use a hosting that has a shared IP of a banned user on Google – Google may think you’re friends?
4. Too much similar anchor text linking to you – Google guesses it out that you’ve done something artificial to get those links, hence banned.
5. Stupid link building campaigns – Like John’s stay away from them. They are temporary.

Since the Google PR update is nearing, make sure that your blog is safe of these troubles. Remember, no matter how huge or popular you are – if you are not white hat and genuine – Google is going to get you one day – once and for all!

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