Your Affiliate Blog: How Not to Get Banned by Google

How Not to Get Banned by Google

As with all search engine marketing and optimization promotion, there are countless techniques and manners in which to drive sales, traffic, and business to your affiliate’s site(s). One of the most useful and most cost effective pieces to the successful SEO of your affiliate’s site is the creation of an affiliate blog. Easy to set up and easy to maintain, your affiliate blog is a great way to gain incoming links and drive traffic; but like all means of internet marketing, certain rules should be upheld in order to keep from being banned from Google. Let’s take a look at the most popular reasons that Google has banned blogs or sites of any kind in the past, to best help you avoid getting banned in the present and future of your affiliate blog.

1. Duplicate Content: One of the top reasons that Google may ban you from indexing you in their search engine is that you have duplicate content. This refers to the same content used either on multiple pages of your site, or duplicate content found on your site and another’s.

2. Keyword Stuffing: Another way to get your blog or site banned from Google is to deliberately stuff keywords into your content to the point of saturation. You may think that the more you include the same keyword in your site, the more readily Google will be able to find and rank your site, but it has the counter effect. Google does not like to see anyone trying to manipulate their search engine for better rank.

3. Bad Linking Choices: Bad linking choices can refer to countless types of incoming links, but the ones that seem the most obvious to Google as far as looking artificial are: web farms, webrings, and any sites that do not seem to have related content to your site. Moreover, too many reciprocal links-regardless of content or type-does not help you either.

4. Artificial Mirror Sites: Some call these sites machine-generated, but the basic premise of these sites is that they have the same info and setup to them as each other, and have been set up exclusively for the sake of driving traffic to the primary site. These sites are duplicate except for very minimal changes in text in order to throw off Google-they don’t.

5. Cloaking Pages: Cloaking, if you are unfamiliar, is the generation of a hidden page that the end user cannot see, but that Google can still index. This is a strategy some use to boost rank through keyword use. In the past, these cloaked pages were typically safe from Google’s radar, but as Google gets more and more savvy at finding artificial use of their engine, they now know how to find cloaking abuse and punish sites for it.

6. Hidden Links: Lastly, some website owners have used hidden text in the past to boost rank with Google. Again, the end user cannot see these text links-and so therefore, can be put anywhere-but Google will still index them as viable text links. Google now can spot these artificial text links, and will quite probably ban your site for it.