Our views on the ‘whacky’ world of Search.

Making sure that techniques implemented by your SEO provider comply with the Google Guidelines for good acceptable SEO is imperative. Have you read these guidelines? Do you know what is considered good practice, versus what is likely to get your site banned by the big boys? Take a look at the guidelines here:

 

 Just to clarify something though before you spend all day and all night checking your site against these terms of service, remember that I have never come across anybody who has any clear understanding of what is good, bad or indifferent. Although the Google Quality Guidelines clearly state what is acceptable and what is not, there are millions of sites out there that bend or blatantly break these guidelines, and still enjoy great rage rankings.

 

 One question that raises its head because of this is, should you play along with the rule breakers and risk getting banned by Google. In my opinion the answer is a definitive no. You see, although it took more than 5 years for Google to list its guidelines we have to understand that we live in a fast paced and changing world, and these guidelines will also change.

 

 The Google index algorithms will constantly change, they call it the Google Dance, but over the years some algorithm updates have had more resemblance to a barrage of machine gun fire rather than a strategic implementation of change, particularly if all of your rankings disappear overnight.

 

 Understanding the SEO on your site is a very important task to undertake, particularly if you are outsourcing the work to a 3^rd party service provider. Examples seen recently showed a site where very little on-page optimization had been done, but upon looking deeper, a huge number of URL’s had been directed to point to the same pages. None of the page rankings the site enjoyed could be attributed to the method, but the point is that the site owner did not even know of this technique, let alone that it was present on his site.

 

 Sticking with ethical guidelines is always going to be better for your site and your business stability. Google is now encouraging people to report sites and companies suspected of attempting to trick or manipulate natural search rankings. Time will tell if the dob in a cheat system works, but it does show how serious Google is on cleaning up this sector of the industry, and so it should.

 

 All site owners should be aware that they are responsible for the techniques being used on their site, not the 3^rd party and not the girl next door.

Tags: banned, google, guidelines, marketing, seo, tactics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 5:12 am and is filed under Quality Practises, Safe Guidelines, google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.