I just wrote an article in Swedish titled 25 saker som sänker din sajt hos Google. That’s 25 things that will get your site in trouble with Google. It’s an attempt to summarize the mistakes that I see every day on sites with really clueless webmasters.
Here’s a localised summary in English of the 25 points:
- Don’t use any text on the site’s front page. (Use an image or a Flash movie and some javascript that opens a popup or accesses a deep frameset).
- Don’t use a title tag, or put something totally meaningless in the tag. Then use the same technique and the exact same title text on the entire site.
- Use Flash or an advanced javascript for all navigational menues on the site. Make it impossible for Googlebot to connect an url with any linked text.
- Use framesets where all empedded frames are orphaned, without links to the site’s main page and without any text based navigation what so ever.
- Use a CMS that requires your visitors to accept cookies, and which, if a visitor won’t accept cookies either will add mile long session variables to your URL’s, or even better, redirect any visitor (including Googlebot) to a page explaining that cookies are required to visit the site.
- Do not use H-headers. Instead code any headers on the site with larger font or even better. Use images for all headers and just don’t use the alt attributes for the img tag.
- Only link to sites covering other topics than your site.
- Don’t strive to get any links from site covering your own topic. Ask for links from off-topic sites.
- Use as many and as long parameters in your urls as you can (asp.aspx?page=928908987s98s&context=klh28979s87987989&nav=liki987879879898…)
- Place long javascript elements early in your html code. Overall use a lot of code on your pages before you get to the little text there is. (It is, of course more effective to only publish text as images or flash, but that can be a little too complicated at times…)
- Build your site with very heavy pages consisting almost entirely of javascript, flash and images. Never use the alt, title, noflash, flasccontent codes and attributes.
- Use a mixture of various html-dialects in your html code, i.e. let pages presen themselves as xhtml and then code them with various html 4 specific attributes.
- Use a lot of public domain text or even borrowed (stolen) content on your site. Text elements that can easily be found on other sites that are older than your own.
- Make sure that your robots.txt-file shuts any serious spiders out from the site. (Too easy, I know, almost like cheating.)
- If you can. Use a technique where every URL on your site is parsed through a 404 page which leaves the 404 server response.
- Do not display any contact details on your site.
- Use a server that has a lot of down time, so that the site is gone for days at times.
- Use a server that is very far from your potential customers. Why not try a server in Korea for your US customers?
- Code the wrong language version on your pages. Use <html lang=”de”> for pages in english.
- Don’t code the character set, or use the wrong character set for all pages. That will tell Google not to come searching for any words containing characters such as ü, æ, ä, å, ö, ç…
- Don’t update your site very often, and if you do, make sure that no updates or changes are reflected on your sites main page. (Don’t change that intro flash…)
- Link to really questionable sites on the web. Spammers, pron sites, sites banned from Google’s index…
- Use a domain that has been banned from Google’s index.
- Avoid deep links to your pages. See to it that it is impossible to deep link to any page other than the main page.
- Try to contact other webmasters linking in to your site and ask them to link with words such as this, here, click here, that…
I know. There’s more. Please feel free to use the comment feature…
Posted by Nikke Lindqvist 