Spam:
Yes, people still do it whether it was intentional or not. Some newcomers get confused in regard to legal, productive ways to help boost their keyword percentage and spam. The keyword tag with too many keywords or keywords repeated too many times is spam. Comment tags are for comments, not for keywords. Your description tag is for a description. Yes, keywords should be in it. However, it should not be blatantly "chocked full" of keywords. Insistently, the keywords in your description should reflect that particular page, not your entire site. Each page has its own keywords.

Another way to spam is to hide text. Creating text and making it the same color as the background is spam. Spam can sometimes be unintentional. If your site repeats the same words over and over it can be seen as spam. For example let's say your site sells airline tickets. Your site may state that you sell "tickets to New York", "tickets to San Francisco", "tickets to Indiana", etc. If you list all 50 states with the word "tickets" attached, that's spam!

Redirect:
If you own several domain names and have them redirect to one, that is bad SEO. The only redirect allowed is a 301 redirect. It should only be used to redirect an old site to a newer site (old domain to a new domain). This tells Google that it is a 'permanent' re-direct.

Linking to bad neighbors:

A bad neighbor is a site that is considered to use Black Hat SEO methods.
These can hurt you big time. Some examples of bad neighbors are:

1. Free-for-all link farms
2. Adult web sites
3. Gambling web sites
4. Sites that have multiple categories to link to.

It is hard to undo links to bad neighbors. You can try to check your back links and try to find the bad neighbors. Then, try to see if they will remove your link. It usually takes a large amount of bad links to hurt you. If you stick to sites that are related to you and your industry, you will likely be ok. Sometimes people search for an easy way to generate one way links by turning to directories. These can do a lot more bad than good. Plus, many are automated, making removal next to impossible

Duplicated Content:
This falls under the spam rule listed above. Basically, if you create a page and then duplicate it throughout your own site, it will hurt you. If your site is large, you can use this free tool http://www.copyscape.com it will help you locate duplicated content on the web. You won't be penalized if your content (i.e. articles) is syndicated to other sites, only if it is repeated on the same domain. You can use similar content on pages. Google does not tell us the percentage of content that is considered to be spam so I would suggest you keep it below 15%.

Robot,txt:
Sometimes this is inserted improperly. The robot.txt file is a set of instructions for search engine spiders. It tells them what to index or not to index. This file resides in your root directory. If the tag is incorrect it could prevent all search engines, not just Google, from indexing your site. Or, in some cases, removing it from the search engine index altogether. If inserted properly you should be able to locate it by going to www.yoursitehere.com/robots.txt to validate that your robot file is in proper order. For more info on how to properly format your robot tag, visit http://www.seoconsultants.com/robots-text-file/ .

These are some of the major things to look out for. If you have been banned from Google, go through this list one problem at a time. After you have made the corrections, contact Google. If you still have problems you may need to start all over with a new domain.


Joe Balestrino is a published SEO writer. To learn more about his services visit his site at http://www.mr-seo.com