SEO Penalties and Violations
- November 19, 2013
- Bradley Taylor
The main purpose of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to enable your website to receive a high ranking among the top search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN. There are a wide range of different SEO tools that are essential to your websites’ success if they are practiced correctly. At the same time, if these specific tools are ignored and not properly followed, your website will definitely be exposed to a wide range of different search engine penalties and violations. A website will be penalized for violations that occur regularly like reproduced content, unfavorable link building, cloaking, building backlinks to improper sites like casinos and producing hidden texts.
A quick way for your website to be penalized for violating search engine standards is by producing unoriginal content. One of the best protections that SEO provides to website owners is that it basically guarantees the production of unique material. By not following these expected SEO guidelines and reproducing someone else’s content, your website will absolutely be penalized. In fact, Google has just taken the content violation further; recently explaining that any content that does not contain actual substance will be further penalized.
Another violation that will cause your website to be penalized is hiding text on your website. Hiding text is when you bury certain words in the content on your website in order to achieve a high search engine rating. A prime example of this is using specific keywords in black font against a black background. This is an attempt to trick the search engines as reader’s are unable to see the hidden words. Needless to say, hiding text is a deviant act that search engines take extremely serious.
Similar to hiding text, the practice of cloaking will definitely cause your website to receive harsh penalties. Cloaking in a more refined way of trying to hide keywords on your website. This specific violation is when your website is programmed to look different depending on whether the visitor is a search engine or a live person. Cloaking is possibly the worst SEO violation that you can do and could potentially get you banned from just about every important search engine on the web as it’s a direct violation of the rules.
While keyword optimization is one of the main components of SEO, keyword stuffing is a search engine violation that will automatically get your website penalized. While search engines do expect your website to contain a specific amount of keywords, repeating these keywords over and over will create a rather large penalty for your site. In addition, if a search engine determines that the same keyword is continually duplicated, it will view your site as spam. This is one of the last things that you want to happen to your website.
If you’re a website owner that is aiming for online success, it is extremely important for you to be well aware of all the potential violations and penalties that can occur and are associated with various SEO practices. By not abiding to each search engine rule and regulation, your website and online life might be very short lived.
