Search Engines

Google Don'ts

Frames
The issue of frames and whether or not they will cause a website to be penalized or banned is quite controversial. Googlebot, Google's indexing robot, will not enter or read any content that is inside frames. Google instructs users that using the NoFrames tag on your framed pages will allow Google to index the pages, but this is not always the case. Using frames on your website is a gamble.

Dynamic Pages
This is another issue that is a gamble. Google will index file types including html, pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfml, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri. The problem with this is certain file types and extensions are more likely to rank better and are more optimizable. Google has officially stated that it will only index a certain amount of dynamically generated pages, which includes URLs with a query string, as a result of server issues. If a search term brings back 3,000 results, there is a good chance that your dynamically generated page will show up in the SERPs. On the other hand if another search term brings back 1,000,000 results, the chances are that your dynamically generated page will not show up. One reason for this is that if there are so many competing sites you can bet that there are a great deal of optimized websites, and dynamic pages do not fall under this category.

Orphan Pages
The way that Google finds a website and the web pages within a website is by sending out Googlebot, Google's indexing robot. Googlebot will crawl each page and then follow the links on the page to the next page. If have orphan pages, which are pages that have no links pointing to them, on your website, Googlebot will not be able to find the pages. If the page has no links pointing to it, than improving the page's link popularity and Page Rank, which we discuss below, are virtually impossible.

Orphan pages are also bad from a usability standpoint. How is the user going to find the page if they don't know the URL or did not find the page in a search engine?

"Doorway Pages"
These pages, which are created to target a specific keyword, have been criticized and deemed as spam by many webmasters and search engines. Almost every search engine states in their TOS, or on their submission pages, not to submit doorway pages. The reason that doorway pages have a bad reputation is because they were abused and also because they are in essence orphan pages. Certain people in the SEO industry and webmasters would create a page that had a very small amount of actual content, that was high in keyword density, and had links into the actual website. These pages would then be submitted to the search engines to rank well for a specific keyword. These pages were fairly easy to create, and therefore could be made on a high-scale basis, creating irrelevant pages being served during search results, and at the same time creating more spam within the search engines.

Targeting a keyword is fine, and is what we do as optimizers. There are some things to think about when creating a page to target a keyword so that the page is not classified a "doorway page." Does the page have any real content on it? Is the page actually connected to the rest of the site? What is the keyword density of the page? Most importantly, would a human reviewer let this page pass?

In essence, every page on your site should be a doorway page as they should all target a specific keyword, but the trick is to make these pages an integral part of the site. Don't isolate the page, have no valuable content, or make the page a mere entrance point into the site.

Get Caught Cloaking
Notice that I didn't say, "Don't Cloak." The reason that I didn't say this is because some people are very successful using the cloaking method. Cloaking is a method of search engine optimization where through scripting the search engine is fed a highly optimized version of a page and the user is served a different version of that page. There are many forms and uses of cloaking, and some of the search engines even use it.

Google has officially stated in their "Do's and Don'ts" that they will not allow cloaked pages in their database, and other search engines have the same policy. One way of Google finding websites that use cloaking is their Cache feature. So, if you are going to cloak pages that you would like to rank in Google, you must be careful and pay attention to them. Again, this form is sometimes a gamble.

Hidden Text
This is an old trick that used to work, but has since been thrown out the window. If one was to use this method, it is safe to say you are going to get classified as a spammer.

Abusive Submission (automated - manual)
While all search engines warn against abusive submission, the methods of submission and getting your website listed in the Google SERPs area bit different. Google states that submission is not necessary for inclusion into their database. Googlebot spiders its way throughout the websites that are already in the Google database, and the best way to get Googlebot to visit your website is to get a link on one of these sites. This will also tie into your website's link popularity and Page Rank. To increase the chance that your website will be found by Googlebot, find a well ranking site for one of your target keywords and request that they post a link to your site. Another way to be found without submitting is to get a listing in the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!.

Those are the issues with manual submission. Several months ago Google was found to be penalizing websites that are from certain IP's. What they were doing was penalizing websites that were using programs that would report the website's ranking. Google noticed a huge amount of requests on their server from people, webmasters, and optimizers abusing the programs that would allow them to check their ranking. Google will detect the IP that the requests are coming from and either penalize or block the IP.

Keyword Density Too Low
Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to text on a web page. Your keyword density is a factor in a web page's ranking for each target keyword. If the keyword density is too low, than this may be part of the reason your site is not doing well in the SERPs. Search Engine World has a good tool to check your keyword density.

Keyword Density Too High
Your keyword density shouldn't be too low, but it also shouldn't be too high. If your keyword density is too high than Google may see the page as spam or a doorway page. The keyword density of your page and what number you should target is all relative to your market. If the web page's in the top 10 of the SERPs all have an average of 50% keyword density, than you will want to target a number that is roughly the same to be able to compete.

Bad Navigation
The navigational structure relates to the orphan pages and to Googlebot being able to find its way through your entire site. Your website should have a clean navigational structure that makes it easy for the user to get through the site, as well as Googlebot. Themes are a good way to lie out your navigational and website structure.

The best form of navigation is text, as it will help with keyword density and word count, as well as defining the link for the robot. Flash was previously a form of navigation to stay away from, but recently Google began indexing Flash links.