How you can get your site banned from Google

I am not going to go further here into how to run your link building campaigns. That discussion

will be discussed in detail in our future editions of

Link Building Tutorials.

Instead I am going to discuss several tactics that people use to try to “trick” Google. Most of these

tactics include getting invalid links to your web page(s).

Link Farming / Free-for-all (FFA) sites

The first thing to stay far far away from is link farming. This is also known as Free-For-All (FFA) sites.

The basic idea of FFA sites is that they promise to add your link to thousands of pages for a small fee (or

for free).

Your link is then placed along side thousands of other unrelated links in a hope to boost your PageRank.

There are two problems with this: First, the more links there are on one page the less importance

Google places on them. This means that the link value will be next to nothing.

Second, Google frowns upon FFA sites and penalizes them. That means if you are hosting a FFA page

in hopes of getting thousands of incoming links, your ranking will probably go down, if not altogether

disappear.

In the end just remember this: Link Farming is bad!

Rapid Link Gain and Loss

In Google’s Search Engine Patent the following block can be found:

This basically means that Google considers not only the number of links that you have, but how fast

you acquire them. They assume that if you are still acquiring new links on a regular basis then your

site must be important. If you are not, then your content is out of date and “stale.”

This would seem to contradict what I said above about link farms as they would definitely make it appear

as if your document became suddenly very important. To understand why this is not the case, we will read

a little further in the patent document.

Google keeps their numbers secret, so I cannot tell you how many links you should acquire each day in order

to keep within their regulated amounts. However, we can most likely correctly assume that adding

1000 links in one day is too much.

The basic principle here is to use what Google calls “editorial discretion on making links.”

In essence you should know exactly which links you are adding to your site and why you are adding them.

Any program that allows you to add hundreds of links automatically should usually be avoided, unless

you are certain they are targetted and relevant.

Linking for the Sake of Linking

The last thing that you can do to lower your rankings is to start linking to others just because you

think that it might be a good idea.

Google has made it clear that it considers links that you have first reviewed to be of higher quality than

automatically placed links. However, just because you have looked at a link does not mean that it should

be placed on your site.

Before you initiate a link exchange make sure that the site has content relevant to your own. Do not

just link to somebody and have them link back for the sake of linking. It will do you no good.