Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Avoiding Overly Aggressive SEO

Google, like other major search engines, urges you to avoid overly aggressive SEO practices when you build your site.

Here’s why you should avoid being overly aggressive with SEO (besides wanting to avoid Google’s disapproval): building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of common sense; just build a site that will be useful or interesting to people, and it will naturally get indexed correctly, although this may take some time.

With this viewpoint, you shouldn’t concern yourself with search order ranking or SEO when you construct your site. Just create worthwhile content that is genuinely useful, interesting, or entertaining. However, at the same time you needn’t be naïve. It makes sense to deploy sites and pages in the most SEO-compliant way possible that doesn’t cross the line into deceptive behavior—or one of the constructions frowned upon by Google.

Note

SEO experts tend to disagree with this “build it with quality and they will come” theory of site creation. They point to the incredible competition for premium SEO results, and the money that is at stake, and suggest planning in advance for effective SEO with a knowledgeable expert.

Google’s Prohibitions

Following is a list of the techniques that Google considers bad behavior. Google prohibits these things because it considers them overaggressive and deceptive, but note that Google does not consider this list exhaustive and may penalize your site for anything new that you come up with if ...