Whether you like it or not, Google is the place to be ranked well.

Yahoo! and Bing can offer their share of traffic, but nothing serves up traffic like a top ranking in Google. Unfortunately, no search engine is quicker to hand out a penalty either.

As the clear leader in the search engine market, it’s hard to blame Google for being quick to hand out a penalty to a website. There are hundreds of ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques and tricks that aim to ‘game’ Google and give a website owner a top ranking without requiring much work to achieve it. If one person discovers a hole in Google, it takes very little time for an entire drive of website owners to start changing their sites to take advantage of this hole.

But is Google too quick to hand out a penalty?

They have claimed in the past that it would be unlikely for a legitïmate site to receive a penalty. However, with all the confusion on the Internet about what good SEO really is, is it possible that a legitïmate site owner accidentally employs a technique shared by spammers? The site owner may have no intention of defrauding Google, but they may still receive the penalty.

Google Plans to Alert Site Owners of Potential Problems

Great news for website owners who fear they may have been penalized by Google. Matt Cutts, the owner of this quickly growing blog and a Google employee, confirmed on his website that Google is piloting a new program that will proactively alert website owners to potential problems on their websites.

This is definitely exciting for website owners who are unsure if they have been penalized, but it should not be taken out of context. Keep in mind the following points:

1. This is a pilot program. It is not a full-fledged program that guarantees everyone who has been negatively affected will be contacted. Chances are, you will not be contacted at all.

2. It is an automated program. Google will not have any one person sending out these emails, but a bot that will have to ‘discover’ your email address. If it can’t find one, it will try to guess an email address. If you’re good at protecting yourself from spam, you may not receive a message from Google even if they want to contact you.

The Many Ways to Get Penalized by Google

There are many ways to get accidentally penalized by Google. Preventing your site from being penalized takes a lot of attention to detail. Even if you have hired a professional SEO firm, you should be mindful of the problems that can arise from a simple mistake. Below are several things to look out for on your site.

Duplicate Pages

This is a common problem that can be difficult to avoid, especially on large websites. Duplicate pages are pages that have essentially the same content; they are an old trick employed by search engine spammers. Search engine spammers would use the same page repeatedly but change keywords at the bottom of the page to create some variation and focus on different niches.

Accidentally recreating this sp@m technique can be very easy to do. Below are a few ways in which you could have duplicate pages without even knowing about it:

* If you use different landing pages in your advertising campaigns to measure ad effectiveness, you are essentially building duplicate pages. If Google discovers these different landing pages, it may think that you are using duplicate content.

* Sites that allow users to print pages often create two pages with essentially duplicate content. Using mod_rewrite to create search engine-friendly URLs can also create duplicate pages.

When you use mod_rewrite, the server will serve the same page regardless of whether you use the search engine-friendly URL or the regular URL.

These are just a few examples of how duplicate pages can creep into your website.

You should look for more ways that duplicate pages could have crept into your website. If you find duplicate pages on your website, you should exclude them using the robots.txt file.

Redirecting Users

Another favorite technique of search engine spammers is using redirects to create doorway pages, also known as cloaking. The idea here is to prehëre one page to a search engine spider that is optimized for the search engine and present an entirely different page to the user.

Search engine spammers use a variety of redirects, ranging from complex JavaScript redirects to simple HTTP refresh commands.

There are many valid reasons to redirect users to a different page on your website. Whether you’re changing the name of your website or its structure, your website pages may not always be in the same place, and you never want to lose a visitor to an ugly 404 page.

Google doesn’t like a 404 page.

Google recognizes that you may need to add a redirection from time to time. If needed, use a 301 redirect. There are several ways to employ a 301 permanent redirect. Below are two examples:

Example 1 – Using mod_rewrite
Options +FollowSymLinksRewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.comRewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Save this file as .htaccess and upload it to your server.

Example 2 – Using an Apache Redirect
Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com/
Save this file as .htaccess and upload it to your server.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest search engine optimization techniques. All this entails is using your targeted keywords repeatedly on your website. Keyword stuffing can happen throughout the content of your website, in hidden text, in the alt property of your images, in the meta tags of your website, in HTML comments, or a variety of other ways.

The example above is an exaggerated example of keyword stuffing, but it often happens with website owners. The desire to rank high in search engines usually leads a person to include their keywords on their site more frequently than they would typically do. As a general rule, if the text on your page appears unnatural to you, it will seem unnatural to the search engines.

Be Vigilant and Be Natural

So far, Google has done a decent job of keeping sp@m out of their index. It still finds its way into their results, especially for less competitive keywords. However, when Google detects spam, it tends to develop new methods to identify and remove it from its index. Unfortunately, they will inevitably affect website owners who are not aware that they are doing something wrong.

Google has taken a positive step by starting its pilot program, which aims to notify website owners who may be unintentionally doing something wrong.

However, the website owner ultimately has the responsibility. If you’re having trouble ranking well for your target keywords, take a few minutes today to review your website.

Ask yourself if you have duplicate pages, if there is any hidden text, or if you are possibly stuffing keywords on your page. Do you have any redirects that could be misinterpreted? Take the time to re-read Google’s webmaster info and familiarize yourself with it.

Getting to the top of Google is hard work, but it is well worth it when you do.

Post excerpts from Mark Daoust