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Avoid Search Engine Blacklisting
By Kevin Kantola

The best way to avoid being blacklisted by the search engines 
is to avoid using some questionable techniques that were once 
popular to gain high rankings. Even if your website is not 
blacklisted by using some of the techniques below, it may be 
penalized (buried in the rankings) so your traffic will suffer 
all the same. When a search engine blacklists a website it will 
throw your listing off their site and block your site from 
coming aboard again. This can be done by blocking the domain 
name, the IP address or both. Here are a few techniques to 
avoid, so that your site will not be blacklisted: 
 
Mirror Websites
 
Mirror websites are sites with identical content but different 
URL's. This was once a method used to gain high rankings in the 
search engines, but since search engines are smarter now, this 
will only get you penalized or blacklisted. 
 
Doorway (gateway) Pages
 
Doorway pages are pages with little real content for your 
visitors that are optimized to rank highly within the search 
engines. These pages are designed so that visitors will move 
deeper into the website where the real content lies. Navigation 
to the doorway pages are usually hidden from the visitors (but 
not the SE robots) on the homepage. 
 
Invisible Text and Graphics
 
Using invisible text (text the same or a very similar color to 
the background) was once used to spam a homepage and some inside 
pages with non-stop keywords and keyphrases. Also links to 
doorway pages and hidden site maps can be done with invisible 
text (or invisible graphics). Some designers will create a 
graphic link with a 1 pixel by 1 pixel raster image and link 
this to a hidden inner page such as a hidden site map. 
 
Submitting Pages Too Often
 
Submitting the same pages to the search engines within a 24 hour 
period can get you penalized and may delay your website from 
being listed in the rankings. Some search engines believe that 
pages submitted sooner than every 30 days is too much. The 30 
day rule is a good rule to follow when submitting to multiple 
search engines. 
 
Using Irrelevant Keywords
 
Using irrelevant keywords in a website's metatags and / or body 
copy in order to achieve high rankings will most certainly 
backfire. Search engines now want to see parity between these 
two areas and if your site is thought to be sp@mming with 
irrelevant keywords, your site will be penalized or blacklisted. 
 
Automated Submissions to the Major Search Engines

Using an automated service or software to submit your website to 
the search engines can be extremely counterproductive. Most of 
the major search engines and directories accept manual 
submissions but do not like to be spammed with the automated 
ones. 
 
Cloaking
 
Cloaking is the practice of deceiving both the search engine and 
the visitor by serving up different pages for each. The visitor 
sees a nicely designed and formatted page and the search engine 
robot scans a page of highly optimized text. Any practice that 
is deceptive should be avoided and the downfall of cloaking is 
that, if caught, the website can be banned permanently. 

Using a Cheap or Free Web Host
 
Using a cheap or free web host can hurt in the search engine 
rankings. Frequent downtime, pages taken down for exceeding the 
bandwidth deter robots from indexing your site. If a robot cannot 
access your site often enough, your site will be dropped from 
the search engines. Hosting is cheap, so if you are serious 
about your website, get your own domain name and host, not one 
like geocities.com/yoursite. 
 
Sharing an IP Address
 
Sharing an IP Address even from a legitimate web host can get 
your site in trouble. If you have cleaned up your website from 
all of the techniques mentioned above and your website still 
does not get re-listed by the search engines in a couple of 
months, check with your host to see if you are sharing an IP 
address with other sites. If so, you may consider moving your 
website to a new host who will give you your own IP address or 
at least one that is not shared with another company who has 
had their IP address (and yours) banned by the search engines. 
 
FAST's Director of Business Development and Marketing, Stephen 
Baker, has stated that globally there are approximately 30 
million crawlable servers and approximately two-thirds have been 
banned by the FAST network for sp@mming. If these numbers are 
correct, your site may be blacklisted or penalized for "guilt by 
association."  
 
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Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO Resource, a search engine 
optimization company, devoted to achieving high rankings and 
increased traffic. Visit the SEO Resource website to see how 
your site may benefit at http://www.seoresource.net or 
mailto:seoresource@excite.com 
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