Lost in virtual space
If you’ve been following the drama series Lost which returns to free-to-air television this month, you’d understand the arduous journey of a booby-trapped way home, if there is one. When it comes to the Internet jungle, no website should befall the same fate. Especially if the jungle is Google and fate is one of banishment, by design or by accident.
How your website gets lost
Search engines like Google will banish a website from its search pages for various reasons. Among the more common ones are practices labelled as “Black Hat”.
Black hat methods are underground practices that attempt to outsmart and manipulate search engine preferences for relevant keywords and backlinks to reap short-term gains. Keyword stuffing – the excessive placement of keywords on websites – and irrelevant linking are two of its main tactics.
The other tactics include Gateway or Doorway Pages which refer to low-quality web pages filled with gibberish or ramblings and no real content. Scraper sites are equally guilty as they contain nothing but advertising. And link farms are unpardonable as they are sites that simply display links and nothing more.
Together with breaching of other Google guidelines, the above abuses can result in your website being expelled into the Internet blackhole.
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Lost website equals loss in business
For all the preachings on search engine marketing, it’s clear that any business looking to maximise traffic to their site needs to remain listed on every important search engine. Losing your place in Google means being invisible to about 45% of web surfers globally.
The proof can be found in a case study published by Hitwise on 13 February 2008, about an insurance comparison website GoCompare.com that was blacklisted by Google after the search engine detected irregular inbound links to its site.
Prior to the ban, GoCompare topped Google’s organic results for the search term “car insurance”, capturing 17.49% of all clicks from the keyword. But after Google sanctioned the website on 26 January this year, GoCompare plummeted down the search rankings and suffered an 87% reduction in traffic, generating a mere 2.31% of clicks in the first week following the ban.
The woes of GoCompare became the blessing for its closest competitors, Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com, as their search engine traffic soared to 77% and close to 300% respectively over the subsequent two weeks.
While it is definitely a big setback, being blacklisted need not be your lifelong fate. Like a publicly shamed child in the same vein as Corey Delaney of the Narre Warren South street mayhem fame, you can repent and ask to be taken back into the Google family.
Playing it safe on the Internet
Firstly, these problems would not arise if websites abide by the laws that govern search engine behavior. By familiarising and following Google guidelines, ensuring your site has specific content relating to your products or services, and not over-filling your site with unrelated keywords will prevent your website from being exiled.
Beyond the above points, Google may also ban your site if it does not adhere to other criteria. No one knows exactly what these other criteria refer to or what search engines disapprove of when it comes to websites. In any case, don’t expect their insider secrets to be aired on YouTube considering how tight-lipped search engines are on these issues. So the safest and surest thing to do is to keep your website content focused and relevant at all times.
Getting back into Google’s good books
To receive mention amongst the pages of Google again can be as simple as re-submitting your site to their directory. Getting back after being caught for inappropriate tactics takes longer, though.
You can expect a long trial period to prove that you consistently abide by the guidelines once more. During this trial period, Google can agree to list your site on one of their back pages in search results.
After about six months of “clean living” and abiding by all rules, you may notice your rank rising and traffic referred by Google starting to show up once again. We may never know if the islanders from Lost will ever be found, but for your website, it’s definitely not a lost cause.
Need help?
Talk to a Melbourne IT e-Business Consultant on 1300 132 838.
Useful links
February 20th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
OUR WEBSITE WAS REMOVED FROM NINE MSM ABOUT OCTOBER OF 2007 AS BEST WE KNOW AND REGARDLESS OF OUR CONSTANT REQUESTS TO BE RE LISTED, WE ARE STILL NOT LISTED WITH THEM:
EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING AND FRUSTRATING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
February 20th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Hey,
Being a novice, I find this type of information extremely helpfull.
As I go about optimising my website myself, these tips a very valuable and great to know now and not after I’ve done something stupid.
Great stuff, keep them coming please.
Peter
February 20th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Interesting and humourous post Melbourne IT.
To Phil Farmer, Microsoft’s MSN / Live Search has some serious problems right now, and yours is one of thousands of Australian sites that have been dropped from its index.
Fortunatley though, their search engine only represents about 3% of the Australian market so you’re not missing out on much. Concentrate on Google instead, they have at least 85% of Australian searches.