BrightHaus Digital Marketing Agency

Google: My Life on the Black-List

November 26, 2010

Often people get caught up in the excitement of getting their site on the 1st page of Google so quickly that they end up taking SEO a little too far and hurt their overall rankings.  They often try to manipulate the system by overusing SEO techniques in an attempt to boost their rankings much faster.  What people often don’t realize is that Google is fully aware of these bad practices and will punish those who dare try to trick them.

Google has certain guidelines that users must abide by when building links for their site.  If these guidelines are abused, Google will blacklist that site ultimately pulling it off the search engine radar and let me tell you, the blacklist is not where you want to be.  Examples of these bad practices include: placing hidden text or hidden links on your site, loading your pages with irrelevant keywords, creating multiple pages, domains, or sub-domains with substantially duplicate content, and over-building links to the home page of your site.

So what do you need to do to get back on the A-list?  First of all, determine what it is that may have gotten you blacklisted in the first place.  Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and make sure your site abides by all of their rules.  Once you have been able to figure out what it is that is causing Google to block you from ranking well on the search engines, fix it.  Remove links, hidden text, and irrelevant keywords and replace that information with unique and relevant pages for your website.

Once you have gotten your site back in line with Google’s guidelines, you can ask them to reconsider your site.  To request reconsideration of your site, follow the steps below:

  1. First, make sure you’ve added your site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verified site ownership.
  2. Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools.
  3. On the Dashboard, under Talk to Google in the list on the right, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps.

Getting blacklisted on Google is a huge hassle that can most certainly be avoided.  So just remember, when it comes to SEO – keep it clean, and keep it safe.