5 Ways to Prevent Search Engine Penalization and Promote Higher Rankings

Being penalized in the search engines can have a significant impact on the success of your online business, particularly if you depend on organic traffic. Penalties can range from having your site completely de-indexed from the SERPs (search engine results pages) to having your rankings lowered. Google in particular has become more proficient in detecting artificial SEO campaigns through their Penguin and Panda updates. Fortunately, you can keep your current pages rising in the SERPs and increase the overall PageRank/ authority of your site by using a few simple techniques on a regular basis. Consider the following 5 tips to avoid search engine penalization and promote higher rankings for your website:

Tips to Avoid Search Engine Penalization:

Understand and Avoid Duplicate Content

There are two types of duplicate content – plagiarized content taken from other websites, and pages/sub-domains on the same site that contain multiple copies of the same content. Surprisingly, the latter (duplicate content on the same site) is actually more detrimental to your ranking than pulling content from other sites. Think about it – how many news sites have you seen that post copies of syndicated news stories found all around the web – yet none of these major online media outlets are penalized in the SERPs. Why? Because they attribute the content to the original author by leaving a link to their page intact, and search engines rightfully recognize this seemingly plagiarized content as simply being a cited source of information. On the other hand, if more than one page on your site contains an exact copy of content found on another page on the same site, this could result in duplicate content penalties rather quickly.

Never Use Hidden Links or Text

Search engine penalization creates a bad impression of your website and you should avoid that anyhow. Hiding text or links is a method frequently used by unscrupulous SEO practitioners who try to fool Google’s ever-changing algorithms by sneaking in links and text that visitors can’t see. This allows them to optimize for certain anchor text and pass on “link juice” to external sites without affecting the visible content. However, search engines have learned to recognize these sneaky tactics and are quick to penalize webmaster who use them. All links and text should be completely visible and easy to read in order to avoid unnecessary penalization. Using any type of cloaking method is discouraged as it could lead to an immediate de-indexing of your site and all its pages, thereby rendering all of your SE efforts futile and useless.

Don’t Link to “Bad Neighborhoods” or Poorly Ranked Sites

Try not to post outgoing links to websites that have very poor rankings, have been de-indexed, or contain illegal/adult content. Doing this could significantly reduce your rankings because search engines will draw a correlation between your site and these “bad neighborhoods.” Instead, limit the number of outgoing links you post, and try to only link to authority sites in your niche as sources of information cited within your articles. Likewise, you shouldn’t have incoming links pointing to your site from poorly ranked or penalized sites. By only linking to relevant authority sites in your industry you’ll be sending the message that you are also a reputable presence.

Avoid Over-Optimization

There are literally hundreds of SEO tips out there that can potentially help you rank higher in the SERPs, but using every one of them simultaneously, or over-using one in particular, is a very bad idea. The people who design search engine algorithms read and follow the latest SEO tactics and they’re able to build software that recognizes patterns indicative of over-optimization techniques that attempt to game search engines. Examples of over-optimization would be using too many keywords, installing too many SEO plugins on your blog, or having too many incoming hyperlinks that contain the same exact anchor text. The easiest way to avoid over-optimization and keep a good balance is to simply focus on providing helpful, relevant, and quality content. If you do this, visitors and search engines will appreciate it and your rankings will inevitably rise over time.

 

 Use HTML Transcripts/Alternatives for Flash Content

While flash content is certainly appealing to the eye and does a great job of portraying key advertising points in a user-friendly, dynamic fashion, search engines haven’t yet developed the ability to effectively index the text within flash animations. In order for the content to be indexed and have an effect on your rankings it will have to have an HTML transcript or content alterative. The best way to do this is to place an article containing the flash animation’s text below the animation on the same page. This serves a double purpose – it gives your impatient reader’s the ability to quickly scan over the content without having to wait around for the flash animation to finish, and it  gives search engines the ability to index the text so that it appears in the SERPs.