Most Important Steps to Avoid Google Penalties

Unless you are interested in keeping a private blog for your own personal purposes or an online journal most Blog writers would like to think someone is interested in reading what they have to share. It can be discouraging to put the effort into creating a wonderful blog only to find that no one is even visiting.

Google Webmaster Guidelines offer several tips for having your blog show up on searches and be noticed by readers who just might find your blog interesting!

The important advice Google has to offer is that if a Blogger chooses to skip all the other recommendations the most important thing to consider are the Google Quality Guidelines. It's important for Blog writers to understand some of the illicit practices that may lead Google to remove a site or blog from their Index entirely or in some other way face a Google penalty. Google makes it clear that if a site or Blog is penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Google Quality guidelines

Google is clear about the fact their Quality Guidelines detail the most common deceptive and manipulative practices but, Google also makes it clear they can respond negatively to other misleading behaviors not listed. It's important to remember that just because a certain deceptive technique is not addressed in their guidelines doesn't mean that Google approves of it.

Google values webmasters and bloggers who invest their time and energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles in order to help provide better user experience by rewarding those sites and blogs with better rankings than those who work hard looking for any loopholes they may find to exploit.

Google's Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Build websites and blogs for your readers and users rather than for search engines.


• "Cloaking" is the deceptive practice of presenting your reader or users with different different content then offered to search engines.


• Avoid tricks designed to improve search engine rankings. The best way to decide if you are using a trick is to ask yourself, "Does this actually help my readers or users and would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"


• Don't participate in link schemes designed with the intent to only increase your site or blog ranking or PageRank.


• It's very important to avoid linking to web spammers or as Google calls them "bad neighborhoods" on the web. Linking to these sites may affect your site or blog adversely.


• The use of unauthorized computer programs often designed to submit pages, check rankings, etc. consume computing resources and violate the Google Terms of Service. For example: Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Google Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

It's all pretty simple and clear Google wants Honest Webmasters and bloggers who offer Original Content with their readers and visitors in mind. The effort and attention should be made to present your visitor with a blog or site that offers what they expect by it's title, tags and search engine listing.

These should be the goals of any honest writer and especially a blog or website owner. While there will always be people who break the rules and cause problems Google wants to rank quality sites that offer what they say they do and uses original content highest while pushing the junk and spam off the search engine.