The biggest nightmare of any serious website is to take an action that would lead to a penalty from Google.  So called Black Hat SEO is avoided by sites that wish to advance in accordance with the rules of Google, and to gain a steady reputation as valuable sources of information.  The good thing is that it is very hard to spam by mistake, at least if you are working with an SEO firm that doesn’t jeopardize your site with dubious SEO methods.

As long as you stay away from the worst types of SEO crimes there is really no reason to fear that Google will penalize your site with a low ranking or even worse, sandboxing which means that the site is taken out of the search results all together!

The Google Panda Update

The Google Panda Update came like a blow in the face to all of the vigorous Black Hat SEO buffs.  Before this update it was quite possible to increase the rank of a site by using fake content peppered with links and place this into article directories.  The Google Panda Update meant that Google had new ways of spotting low quality content where the main object of the text was to gain more links and make it look as if a lot of relevant articles were pointing to a specific site.

Article directories went down with the Google Panda Update and so did many low quality sites.  Even high quality sites that had made the mistake of hiring SEO services of this caliber could see their rankings descend after the update. The winners after this important step by Google were the sites that had always stuck to high quality original content; both for their site and for out-site references.  Since the Google Panda Update, the quality of any content related to a site will have great influence on how it will rank with Google, so this is an area to be strong in to avoid spam charges by Google.

Duplicated Content

There has been an ongoing discussion regarding duplicated content and how it can affect a site.  Many claim that duplicated content is a sure way to lose credibility with Google and while this is true in some ways it is not always an area to stay clear of.  For sure, if you use duplicated or spun content for your site you do risk being labeled as a spammer and cheater by Google with lower ranking as the result.  However, sites that consciously duplicate already indexed content into good article directories are doing something entirely different.  Google sees where the content originated and also who is duplicating it and where. These are factors that will determine if the activity is spam or not.

The reason that people are still wary of using indexed content from the own site for duplicates is that this activity can get out of hand if done without proper knowledge.  By signing up to services like blog carnivals, the content could be spread without links going back to the original, and too many duplicates will not be liked by Google.  This sort of scenario could lead to a lower rank for the site even if it is not labeled as outright spam activity.

Keeping it Clear and Real

Something to stress, in order to avoid spam and penalties from Google, is not to try and hide things from real readers.  It is technically possible to place text in a site and color it so that real readers can’t see it. This can be done to spice the site with more keywords or to make a link look less as a sales pitch.  Google is aware of these methods and they are not liked. Cloaking of links could be done to make an affiliate link look better by giving it a name that would imply that it leads to another page within the same site.  This sort of cloaking is not without risks but fixing a link to make it shorter with cloaking is not necessarily spam.  If it is done to make the link nicer while keeping the name of the affiliate in the link Google recognizes what has been done and will not see it as a try to cloak the true meaning of the link for visitors.

Spamming with Links

Last but not least, backlinks can be seen as pure spam if they are done many at once and without any true relevance to the site.  In this area it is better to work with long term goals and create real links with a human touch.  If hundreds of links are scattered all over in a few days it can most certainly be seen as spam by Google with lower page rank as the result.  A good advice here is to stay away from automated links and only make meaningful backlinks with high relevancy to the original website.

Get. Known. Now.

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