Google Bans Itself For Bad SEO

Posted Monday 5th July 2010 by Kerry in SEO.

The search engine giant Google has always claimed that staff members working on Google product pages have no added advantage in ethical SEO than the any other optimisation professional, and therefore cannot monopolise search results. The news that Adwords help pages were banned by Google for inadvertent cloaking is therefore incontrovertible, and somewhat hilarious evidence that this may in fact be true.

SEO Guidelines

Google’s ethical SEO guidelines are put in place to ensure that search results are demonstrative of what is actually on the landing page to give  user-relevant results. Sites that use cloaking therefore are going against these guidelines, which will result in them being banned from Google’s listings. When Adwords help pages mysteriously dropped from search results it transpired that whoever was working on the product pages in question had violated the rules by hiding sections of page content.

A spokesperson at Google confirmed that Adwords support pages were indeed showing the user different content to the information being offered to the crawler, and stated that this was an inadvertent mistake rather than blatant breach of the guidelines. The mistake, however, does back up the fact that those optimising Google product pages don’t have any specialist knowledge just because they are working for a company that specialises in search.

Ethical SEO

As soon as the error was noticed, Google withdrew the pages, and have begun an investigation to determine how it happened. This is not the first time Google have violated the guidelines, they were banned for cloaking back in 2005, but is a warning to SEO professionals to be vigilant with internal infrastructure. Failure to ensure cached and non-cached versions of a page match up could result in being banned for unethical SEO practices. Whereas Google could state that it was a genuine error that was immediately dealt with, another company may find that the penalties are more severe, and that problem pages are banned altogether despite ethical SEO being at the core of business practice.

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