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Does Google Penalize Innocent Websites?
By Mark Daoust (c) 2005

Whether you like it or not, Google is the place to be ranked
well. Yahoo! and MSN can offer their share of traffic, but
nothing serves up traffic like a top ranking in Google.
Unfortunately, no search engine is quicker to hand out a penalty
either.

As the clear leader in the search engine market, it is hard to
blame Google for being quick to hand out a penalty on a website.
There are hundreds of 'black-hat' SEO techniques and tricks
that all aim to 'crack' Google and give a website owner a top
ranking without them doing as much work to achieve that ranking.
If one person discovers a hole in Google, it takes very little
time for an entire drove of website owners to start changing
their sites to take advantage of this hole.

But is Google too quick to hand out a penalty? They have
claimed in the past that it would be unlikely that a legitimate
site would receive a penalty. However, with all the confusion
on the Internet about what good SEO really is, is it possible
that a legitimate site owner accidentally employs a technique
that is shared by spammers? The site owner may have no intention
of defrauding Google, but they may receive the penalty all the
same.

Google Plans to Alert Site Owners of Potential Problems

There is some great news for website owners who fear they may
have been penalized by Google. Matt Cutts, the owner of this
quickly growing blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) and
employee of Google, confirmed on his website that Google is
piloting a new program which will proactively alert website
owners of potential problems on their website.

This is definitely exciting for website owners who do not know
if they have been penalized, but it should not be taken for
something that it is not. Keep in mind the following points:

1.  This is a pilot program. It is not a full fledged program
that guarantees everyone will be contacted who has been
negatively effected. Chances are, you will not be contacted at
all.

2.  It is an automated program. Google will not have any one
person sending out these emails, but a bot that will have to
'discover' your email address. If it can't find one, it will
try to guess an email address. If you are good at protecting
yourself from spam, you may not get a message from Google even
if they want to contact you.

There may be a day in the not-so-far future where Google is able
to contact legitimate website owners who made an honest (or
maybe not so honest) mistake. That day is not here yet, so the
responsibility is still that of the individual website owner to
make sure they have a legitimate website in the eyes of Google.

The Many Ways to Get Penalized by Google

There are many ways to get accidentally penalized by Google.
Preventing your site from being penalized takes a lot of
attention to detail. Even if you have hired on a professional
SEO firm, you should be mindful of the problems that can arise
from a simple mistake. Below are several things to look out for
on your site.

Duplicate Pages

This is a common problem, and a problem that can be difficult to
avoid, especially if you have a large website. Duplicate pages
are pages that have essentially the same content; it is an old
trick employed by search engine spammers. Search engine
spammers would use the same page over and over again, but change
keywords at the bottom of the page to create some variance and
to focus in on different niches.

Accidentally recreating this spam technique can be very easy to
do. Below are a few ways in which you could have duplicate
pages without even knowing about it:

· If you use different landing pages in your advertising
campaigns to measure ad effectiveness, you are essentially
building duplicate pages. If Google discovers these different
landing pages, they may think that you are using duplicate
content.

· Sites that offer the ability to print pages often create two
pages that have essentially the same content.

· Using mod_rewrite to create search engine friendly URL's can
create duplicate pages. When you use mod_rewrite the server
will serve up the same page regardless of whether you use the
search engine friendly url or the regular url.

These are just a few examples of how duplicate pages can creep
into your website. You should look for more ways that duplicate
pages could have creeped into your website.

If you find that you do have duplicate pages within your
website, you should use the robots.txt file to exclude the
duplicate pages. We published an article last week about the
robots.txt file which should be helpful: How to Prevent
Duplicate Content with Robots.txt and Meta Tags
(http://www.site-reference.com/Search-Engines/9397/index.html)

Redirecting Users

Another favorite technique of search engine spammers is to use
redirects to create doorway pages
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_pages) (otherwise known as
cloaking) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking). The idea here
is to present one page to a search engine spider that is
optimized for the search engine and present an entirely different
page to the user. Search engine spammers use all different types
of redirects, from complicated javascript redirects to simple
http-refresh commands.

There are many valid reasons to redirect users on your website
to a different page. Whether you are changing the name of your
website or changing the structure, your website pages may not
always be in the same place and you never want to lose a visitor
to an ugly 404 page (even Google does not like 404 pages).

Google does recognize that you may need to throw in a
redirection from time to time. If you need to do so, you should
use a 301 redirect. There are several ways to employ a 301
permanent redirect. Below are two examples:


Example 1 - Using mod_rewrite

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Save this in a file called .htaccess and upload it to your
server

Example 2 - Using an Apache Redirect

Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com/

Save this in a file called .htaccess and upload it to your
server.


Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the oldest search engine spamming technique
known. All this entails is using your targeted keywords over
and over and over again on your website. Keyword stuffing can
happen throughout the content of your website, in hidden text,
in the alt property of your images, in the meta tags of your
website, in HTML comments, or a variety of other ways.  To see
an example of keyword stuffing, take a look at this thread over
in our SEO Tips and Tricks
(http://forums.site-reference.com/topic/930/whoa/) portion of
our forums.

The example above is an exaggerated example of keyword stuffing,
but it happens a lot with website owners. The desire to rank
high in the search engines often leads a person to put their
keywords in their site much more often than they would do so
normally. As a general rule, if the text on your page appears
unnatural to you, it will appear unnatural to the search
engines.

Be Vigilant and Be Natural

So far Google has done a decent job of keeping spam out of their
index. It still finds its way into their results, especially
for less competitive keywords, but when Google does find spam
they tend to develop new methods to detect that spam and remove
it from their index. Unfortunately they will inevitably affect
website owners who really do not know that they are doing
something wrong.

Google has taken a very positive step in starting their pilot
program aimed at notifying website owners who may be innocently
doing something wrong, but the responsibility ultimately will
always reside with the website owner. If you are having
troubles ranking well for your targeted keywords, take the time
today to review your website. Ask yourself if you have
duplicate pages, if you have any hidden text or are possibly
stuffing keywords on your page. Do you have any redirects which
could be misinterpreted? Take the time to re-read Google's
webmaster info (http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/) and
familiarize yourself with it.

Getting to the top of Google is hard work, but it is well worth
it when you reach the top.

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Does Google Penalize Innocent Websites
(http://www.site-reference.com/Search-Engines/10149/index.html)
was written by Mark Daoust, the owner of Site-Reference.com.

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