How Not to Optimize Your Google Site Ranking

Note: Before I begin, let me say that I am quite sure that not everyone will agree with what that I have written below. And that’s fine, because that’s exactly what a forum is for: discussing various ideas, opinions and viewpoints, and debating the pros and cons. That being said, let me say that these tips are my own opinions based on my own experience, and therefore may be different than the experiences of other members of this forum.


Most internet marketers know the things you can do to increase your site’s ranking, so I’m going to present some things you shouldn’t do – that is, things that can actually decrease your site’s PageRank.

Avoiding Things Google Doesn’t Like

·Long and complicated URLs. The shorter, and more straightforward, a page’s URL, the better. Google doesn’t like long URLs, nor does it like URLs that contain special characters. To that end, don’t use codes like &id= as a parameter in your URLs; similarly, avoid the use of dynamic URLs. Google indexes only static URLs, not those that are dynamically generated. If your site does include dynamic pages, use a URL rewrite technique to turn your dynamic URLs into static ones. (Before anyone asks, I do not know how to do this. I have a friend that does that sort of thing for me. You can find tutorials on the internet that teach you how, though, such as the one located at Search Engine-Friendly URLs [PHP & MySQL Tutorials] )

·Splash pages. Here’s the thing about splash pages: Nobody likes ‘em. Visitors don’t like them, because they make it take longer to get into your site. And Google doesn’t like them, either, because they don’t include the types of internal links and menus found on a true home page; nor do they include much, if any, text content. (If there are no links to other pages from the first page that GoogleBot encounters, it won’t know about the other pages on your site.) So, you should make your site’s first page a traditional home page, not a splash page; both your visitors and the searchbots will be much happier.

·High keyword density. Although keywords are good, too many of them are bad. (Google assumes that you are including keywords just to get a high PageRank, instead of creating unique content for your users.) So don’t include too many keywords (especially repeated keywords) in your content or <META> code. If a page has too high a keyword density, Google will categorize your page as a doorway page – and penalize you accordingly.

·Hidden text. This is when you disguise keywords or links by making them the same or similar color as the page background, using a tiny font size, or hiding them within the HTML code itself. Many webmasters think this is a clever way to stuff lots of keywords onto a page without looking as if they are doing so. Unfortunately, it’s hard to trick a searchbot; GoogleBot sees hidden text just as easily as it does the regular text on your page – which means they will see all the keywords you’re trying to stuff. And, as may you know, searchbots don’t like keyword stuffing.

·Duplicate content. This is another false trick that too-savvy webmasters sometimes employ, to their own detriment – duplicating content on a site, in the hopes of increasing the number of hits in search engine results. This may be done by putting the same content on multiple pages, or via the uses of multiple domains or subdomains. Unfortunately, duplicating content is a bad idea, as Google utilizes duplicate content filters that will identify and remove duplicate sites from their search results. When you duplicate your content, you run the risk that your main site or page will be filtered out – while the subsidiary content remains.

·Bad outbound links. You know that the quality of your inbound links matters, but did you know that the quality of your outbound links can also affect your search rankings? Google considers the sites you link to as part of its page-ranking process – at least when it comes to overtly low-quality sites. For that reason, you don’t want to link to a site that’s been dropped or banned from a search engine’s index, as you could get punished simply by association.

·Images, videos and animations. This is a simple concept – searchbots read text (including HTML code); they can’t view images, videos or Flash animations. Which means, of course, that creating an image- or animation-heavy page renders that page virtually invisible to Google’s spider. Your page might look great to visitors, but if GoogleBot can’t see it, it won’t get indexed. When in doubt, go with a text-based approach.

·Big pages. This is another reason to go easy on web page images: GoogleBot doesn’t like big pages. More specifically, it doesn’t like long load times. If it takes too much time for all the elements on a page to load, GoogleBot will give up and move on to the next page in its queue – which, obviously, is bad for you.

·JavaScript code. As I stated earlier, Google’s spider reads text and HTML code – well, some HTML code. GoogleBot will ignore JavaScript code in your HTML, which means anything you have in a script won’t be indexed. This is particularly troublesome if you use a JavaScript menu, as the searchbots may not see all the internal links you have in your menus.

·Too much code. Speaking of HTML code, don’t overdo it, either. Having more code than you do actual text on your page will cause GoogleBot to give up before your entire page is crawled. You should avoid employing too many code-heavy effects, such as nested tables or JavaScript effects. If your important text is buried under hundreds of lines of code, you will be at a disadvantage compared to a well-optimized site.

·Invalid HTML. One last thing when it comes to the coding of your site: Don’t create messy code. This is one instance where neatness counts; invalid HTML can confuse GoogleBot’s searchbot and cause it to miss important content.

Deliberate Practices to Avoid

In the previous section I talked about things you might accidentally do that can adversely affect your PageRank rating. There are also some practices that sneaky web designers deliberately do to increase their page rank; Google does take issue with these practices, and can ban you from their index if you are caught.

To that end, here are some of the more nefarious “outlawed” optimization practices:

*Google bombing. Sometimes called Google washing or link bombing, this is an attempt to increase your PageRank by having a large number of sites link to a page by using identical anchor text. For example, you might register several domains and have them all link to a single site using the same anchor text for the links. Searching for the term used in the link anchor text will return the linked-to-site high in the search results. (Google bombing occurs often in blogs, where a site owner will “bomb” multiple blog postings with replies linking to the owner’s site.)

*Keyword stuffing. This is when you insert hidden, random text on a page to increase the keyword density, and thus increase the apparent relevancy of a page. For example, if your page is about trains, you might insert several lines of invisible text at the bottom of the page repeating the keyword train, over and over, or include multiple instances of the word train in a <META> tag. In the past, some search engines simply counted how often a keyword appeared on a page to determine relevance; today, however, Google employs algorithms to detect keyword stuffing. (A related technique is meta tag stuffing, where keywords are stuffed into HTML meta tags.)

*Doorway pages. Doorway pages are also known as gateway pages, landing pages, and entry pages. These are web pages that are low in actual content, and instead stuffed with repeating keywords and phrases designed to increase the page’s search rank. Doorway pages typically require visitors to click a “click here to enter” link to enter the main website; in other instances, visitors to a doorway page are quickly redirected to another page.

*Link farms. This is a group of pages that all link to one another. The purpose of a link farm is to increase the number of links to a given site; since PageRank is at least partially driven by the number of linked-to pages, using a link farm can make it appear as though a large number of sites are linking to a given site.

*Mirror websites. This is the hosting of multiple websites, all with the same content, but using different URLs. The goal is to increase the likelihood that any one (or more) of the mirror sites will appear on Google’s search results page.

*Cloaking. This is an attempt to mislead Google by serving up a different page to the GoogleBot crawler than will be seen by human visitors. This is sometimes used for code swapping, where one page is optimized to get a high ranking, and then swapped out for another page with different content.

*Scraper sites. This is a site that “scrapes” results pages from Google and other search engines to create phony content for a website. A scraper site is typically full of clickable ads.

The Bottom Line

Google makes it easy to get listed in its web index, but getting listed is just the start. Making sure that your listing appears high in Google’s search results requires a lot of hard work, a bit of technical savvy and, even more importantly, useful and relevant content. Too many webmasters get hung up on arcane search optimization techniques, when they should be focusing more on creating sites that more visitors actually want to visit. If you spend your time, instead, on creating a compelling and well-designed website, a high Google ranking will, more often than not, naturally follow.