Michael Doyle | Blog

SEO – Getting banned by Google

There are many ways to manipulate Google into seeing the relevance of your website. If doing so it is likely your site will get banned. Manipulation can be done on page and off page.

On Page

• Using hidden text
• Alt image spamming
• Unnecessary amount of meta tags
• Unnecessary amount of keywords in the page title

Off Page

• Using link farms
• Linking with Penalized websites

Linking with penalized websites can really be annoying. If you exchange links with a site with a PageRank of 6, great! But if that site starts trying to manipulate Google to increase it's PageRank (this is reffered to Black Hat SEO), Google will penalize it and remove it's PageRank. This will leave you exchanging links with bad sites, which Google will penalize you for also. It's a good idea to check up on the sites you are exchanging links with every so often.

SEO – The First Steps

One of my main aims for my site, which I never paid attention to before,  is to get it to the top of the rankings in search engines. Search Engine Optimization is something that I have never paid much attention to, in the past few years, I just didn't have the time to dedicate to it. I'm looking more into it now. A good starting point it is:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-1-page

I've noticed the term "michael doyle portfolio" is turning my site up in google within the first 5 results, which is good, but it's nowhere to be seen when just searching for the term "michael doyle". I have to pay good attention to other search engines, as google isn't the be all and end all in SEO, but it's a good place to start.

I have to look into how I can utilize my flickr, stumbleupon and last.fm accounts to see help my portfolio climb the rankings.