Avoid Getting Banned
Getting to the top of the search engines is difficult.
Backlinks are a very important factor. The temptation is to create lots of sites, blogs, hubs, lenses, social bookmarks all pointing back to your main site. As you can imagine, many people succumbed to this temptation.
Search engines (and Squidoo, HubPages, Digg etc), however, don't like self-promotion. A link to your site should be an indication of approval from a third-party if it is to count. Self-promotion could lead to the 'wrong' results at the top of Google - and if they don't return the best results, people will use another search engine and Google's revenues decline.
Similarly, if HubPages, Squidoo or Digg become synonymous with self-promotion, then people will cease to use these sites. Facebook doesn't want to lose users because of inappropriate contacts. YouTube wants subscriptions to indicate quality content.
In other words, all the sites that we should use to promote our business have rules to prevent self-promotion. The more promotion that you do, the greater the chance that you will fall foul of these rules. If you are only ever logging in with one identity, then there is a small chance this will happen. Many people, however, will create several identities to increase the number of links that are perceived as valid. (I am talking here of less than 10 identities which I would regard as 'greyhat' SEO. Blackhat practitioners will use hundreds if not thousands of identies. The guidelines below would be inadequate for such approaches.)
Guidelines
- don't always link directly to your website - use a link networking approach as outlined in How to Get Backlinks
- use Firefox and ensure that you tick the option to always Clear Private Data
- use CCleaner and always run it before changing 'identity'
- use different browsers and computers if possible
- change your IP address - turning your router on and off will sometimes do this. To check your IP address
- use proxy servers - a proxy server is basically an extra link in the connection between your computer and the site that you are visiting - the site sees your IP address as being that of the proxy server. For a quick and easy way to use proxy servers, visit my Setup Proxy Servers page
- when social bookmarking, don't only bookmark your own sites
This list is far from comprehensive and there is no guarantee that following these guidelines will protect you from being suspended. However if you do follow them, you will increase your chances of survival.
