SEO Blog

It might sound like a simple enough thing to do; but you’d be surprised how many companies, large ones and small, have fallen foul of Google. Some people accept their failings and make amends, while others take affront and try to fight the system.

The simple truth though is that Google controls the market. It isn’t quite a monopoly, but with a 90% share of the market, it might just as well be. Playing by Google’s rules won’t hurt you elsewhere either, with ethical SEO you can benefit right across the board.

Google don’t generally tend to drop websites from their rankings for no reason; whilst it does happen, instances are fortunately rare. Often it can come as a result of some underhanded SEO strategy, which the search giant perceives as trying to game the system. For example, if you are buying your links from link farms, or indeed just sharing reciprocal ones; you can expect a penalty.

Some people have even tried to set up numerous domains and repeated content across them all in the hope of expanding the chances of luring in visitors. Bad move. Google has long-since introduced canonical legislature to counteract any people doing this and punishing them accordingly.

Whilst of course there are ways of gaining links and improving your SEO which lie somewhere in between white and black hat – the very definition of a grey area – risking your online visibility for a couple of ranking places in the short-term is a dangerous games. Year on year, month on month even, Google and the other search engines are improving their unique algorithms to become more sophisticated and reward sites that deserve reward, but also punishing those who have broken ‘the rules’.

Always remember to keep your white hat on when doing SEO. Whether link building or creating new content, you can’t afford to be dabbling with the dark side. Unique content is still by far and away the best way of getting a search engines attention, buying links or multiple site set-ups are almost certainly doomed to failure.

But don’t just take my word for it. Have a read through this Econsultancy post on Foundem’s longstanding issue with Google. As it rightly points out, the main issue that the site has isn’t that it isn’t good – which it isn’t really – but that there is just no unique content. Whatever they’ve done in the past to aggravate Google, they’ve done nothing to repair; resulting in widespread drops in rankings. Worse still they’ve even produced a subsidiary website called ‘The Google Delusion’, to vent their frustrations at the search giant – claiming that it is against innovation.

I’ll leave you to make your own mind up on the validity of Foundem’s argument and whether or  not the site – regardless of having very limited content – deserves a higher ranking. What I would recommend though is a quick read through the comments; this will tell you everything you need to know about what you can do to keep Google onside.

So if you want to continue gaining traffic from search engines, avoid aggravating the leader of the pack.