We all know that Google is penalizing websites left and right for buying links, selling links, duplicate content and for numerous other reasons. And while you maybe safe right now, there is no guarantee that you will be in the future. For majority of us, Google is a huge source of traffic to our blogs and websites, so what will you do if Google penalizes you? We are not all like a web celebrity like John Chow who can still continue to make $40,000 with his blog even after the google penalty. But here is what I can tell you though. You can surely survive and still have a good amount of people visiting your blog.

What distinguishes you from a Popular blog?

They have a huge base of loyal readers already built. So even if they lose google’s ranking, they still have thousands of people visiting their site and reading them. And because they have thousands of people reading atleast hundred are writing about them and linking to them, and through the hundred, they are getting more new users to their blog. So at the end day, They can survive without Google!

Google is big and we know that, but it is not the end of the world. You need to follow the advice of “Not putting all your eggs in one basket” and start doing some of the things I am about to tell you which will ensure you that you are not dependent on Google. Also even if you are not penalized in google, these methods are great for you because they are going to build your readership.

The key point is Build Readership. Usually you get users through Google because you write a good article and a few people link to it, and you rank good for that keyword. But think for a second that you don’t have that luxury for a second. What will you do? Here is what I would:

Get more active in Forums

I will definitely get more active in forums because forums in webmaster industry has a lot of new users joining every day looking for help. That is how they learn, but if you facilitate their learning experience, and help them out, they will be more than likely to stick around to your website and follow you wherever you go. That is how you build the most loyal readership. Read how to use forums effectively and maximize your benefits.

Guest Posts

If you are not doing them already, then start doing them because it is one of the best ways to get mentions from other sites. Not many bloggers turn down a good guest post because in a way you are helping them out by adding good content to their website, but you are helping yourself out by putting out a good reputation for yourself. If you write a good article, people will check out your blog and most likely subscribe. So start writing guest posts. I am always welcoming guest posts, so if you are interested contact me.

Leverage the Power of Social Media

Join social media networks and interact with other users. Share your knowledge with them, and appreciate the community. They will send the love back when you add quality resources to the network. So if you write a good article, and you are active in the stumble community, it will be upvoted by alot of users. Not just that but if you make good friends on social media networks like twitter, you can later have backlinks from their site. Which drives more people to your website. (Check out the results that I got from Social Media)

The idea is give to community, and the community will give back to you. If you offer them spam, they will give you the same quality back. If you offer them good, resourceful articles, they will offer you with good quality of users.

Remember we all love google, and I hope none of you get penalized, but this is surely a way to go about it now, so just incase if you are then you have a set ground. And if you are not, you have a huge readerbase.

Search Engine Optimization. Sounds confusing but really it is a system built on small and simple methods. Anchor text in Internal Linking is just another one of those small tricks. We all know internal linking is something that we should do. It increase your page views and help ranking of your pages. Well just internal linking doesn’t do the job. You need to choose your anchor texts carefully.

A lot of people when they write about their previous posts they use anchor texts such as click here or so. It is of habits. I know I do it a lot as well. But I do it for posts that I don’t really care about. If I want to rank high for some keyword I try to be descriptive in my anchor text.

For Example:

You want to market your site. Check out 13 ways I promoted my Blog.

I could’ve easily said to check how I promoted my self, click here. The click here is not the way to go for important posts.

This change might not sound like a big deal, but remember that drop of water makes an ocean. Start with a drop and you will have your own ocean.

I get this question asked occasionally: Why my website was penalized or banned by Google? So I thought to share some reasons. But before I do that I need to tell you how to distinguish between a penalized or a banned website.

Penalized Websites

Penalized sites are not exactly banned. They just do not rank for their own keywords. So if Balkhis was to be penalized then Balkhis would not rank for the keyword Balkhis on the first page at all, but it will rank for balkhis.com as a keyword. The site will still be in index when you type site:www.balkhis.com

Banned Websites

Banned websites will not rank for their own keywords, but they will not be indexed at all. So if your site is out of index then your website is banned.

Reasons why your website could be penalized or banned by google?

Cloaking – It is bad, don’t do it. Cloaking is basically when a reader see some other page and search engines see another thing.

Duplicate Content – Duplicate content on multiple pages.

Keyword Stuffing – When you stuff insane amount of keywords on your pages.

Buying Links – Buying links from irrelevant sites will get you in trouble.

Linking to Bad Sites – Any site that is not related to your niche is a bad site.

Hidden Text / Links – Sometimes free theme designers do this. They add links to the site and make it no display, so no one see it but the search engines. So make sure you check on that. This will get your site out of index.

Autobot Site – Sites that are generated by machines will kill your ranking because google is smart enough to detect them.

So now you have 7 reasons why your website can be penalized or banned by google. So don’t let that happen to your site.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords. Everyone blogger is after them. So many of us just fill the title with keywords, it looks like a spammy title. So what do you do?

If you ask a SEO guru, they will say that Keywords are one of the most important aspect of the title. Because the keywords in the title make you rank high. If you rank high you will get traffic from the search engine. So if you don’t use keywords, you will be losing a lot of search engine traffic.

But what if no one reads your article. Then your keywords are peice of crap. So some say you should write and not even think about Search Engines. That way your writing will be pure, and you will attract readers. You have to be a bit naive to say that.

Here is what I think we should do.

Keywords are good and it really matters, but it is not the only thing. You have to pick the RIGHT keyword to get a decent amount of traffic. I mean you can rank high for one of the popular term, but will you get targetted traffic? Most likely not! So you have to pick the right keyword. What is the right keyword?

Right keywords are the keywords that you find in your stats. These keywords are the ones that are bringing you the most traffic. Then you use those keywords and ideas to write another post in that area. Trial and error is the name of the game. So if you don’t experiment, you lose automatically. Most of this keyword search is FREE. So do it. It takes a bit of your time, but it is worth it.

So now if you are picking keywords, I am sure there is a hype that he ranks for the keyword make money online. I want to write as many articles to rank at the top spot for make money online. Who cares about that keyword. It might be a popular keyword. But really and seriously how much traffic can you get from that one keyword? With the time and resources that you will spend to rank high for a popular keyword, It is not worth it. Specially when the user is not even the most targeted user. So the idea here is that you use the keywords that are more specific. More toward the niche that you want to target. Obviously it won’t bring as much traffic individually, but you can rank high for niche terms a lot easier, so rank high for tons of niche terms. Collectively, they will bring more traffic!

So now the idea of writing for people. You have to make your headline attractive to users while using these keywords. This is when your talent really comes in. I have told you guys multiple times, I use Digg main page articles to determine what attracts people. I use my own articles to see what brought me the most traffic. So use these until I come up with a few formula sentences for you guys. You can rank really high for any keyword, but if your title is not interesting, people will not click it. So make sure you write something that attracts people.

Most importantly, what ever your title is make sure that your post relates to that. So people know what is going on. Most search engines rank you with keywords and relevancy. Such as hyperlinks, and keywords they find in the text of your article. So you have to write a decent article to get decent ranking in search engines.

Often times this is the case with many businesses. They are not satisfied with their original name, and they want to move. Some people think that moving to a new domain can cause in huge ranking loss while others think it kills traffic. Well I will ask one question, when you move to a new house do you lose everything? Does your relatives stop coming to your house?

Obviously not because you make sure everything gets in the truck that you rented to move. You pack everything. Before you move, you check the other house that everything is fine, and your life will be great there. You give your relatives your new address and directions, so they can still visit you. Well moving to a new domain works along the same line. I am not saying that it is easy because you all know that moving is a pain in real life, and even online. But I can help you maintain the same search engine rankings and traffic if you ever decide to move to a new domain.

Acquire your new location

You can’t move into a house without signing a contract, or lease of a kind. You must make sure that you buy the house before you move in. Just like that you must make sure that you register the new domain before hands. Why do I say that. Well because I know most people are very indecisive when picking new domains. So think of it like moving your real business. Do you stay indecisive when you are moving to your new house. Which house you want to move until the last day? I am pretty sure people don’t do that. They make plans ahead of time. They buy one house that they want, and then plan the moving date. So register the domain of your choice and take the next step.

Decide Moving Date and Prepare to move

Ok so the next step is decide a moving date. You can’t just have a house, and have no plan. Moving is such a painful and complicated process that if you don’t plan it. You will mess up. So plan a date when you want to move, so you are ready. When I say you are ready, I mean a date when you have nothing else to do but this, so moving can be quick and efficient.

Before you move in the new house, you have to go and make sure everything looks fine. You paint the walls maybe add some light bulbs etc. Just like that when you move to a new domain online, you need to make sure all the online requirements such as hosting are taken care of. You have a new design ready and everything.

Pack up and Move already

Packing up is a pain in real life. You have to organize everything. Kitchen utencils on one place, while decorations on another. Well websites are a bit easier then that. You have everything organized already. And the best thing about websites are that you don’t have to leave your old place to have a new place occupied. You can just copy and everything and paste it to the new location.

So make sure you have your web design and everything ready. Make a copy of it and move to a new location. So I am saying don’t leave your old location yet.

If you are going to use a same design, at least change the logo although I prefer you get a new design. Make sure you change all the urls to point to the new domain instead of the old domain. Make sure you keep all the pages and paths similar to your old website because otherwise it will be a lot of work for you.

Redirect your traffic

Once you have fully moved and you are ready to announce it. Well then announce it already. Let all your relatives know and everyone that you moved into a new house, so they can visit you. In old days people used to have a landing page saying We’ve moved, please visit us here. Which is pretty lame in my opinion, so lets just use the redirect method where your user will automatically land on your new page if they type your old domain.

If you followed my direction and kept the same path and file names then you can use the 301 redirect method:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

But if you decide to move and change your locations around, you are making your life a living hell because depend on how many page you have, you would have to individually redirect them.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.site.com/page.htm

If you were wondering where you put these codes, you put them in .htaccess file in your public_html directory.

Keeping your Search Engine Rankings (SERPs)

We are at a tough road here. A danger zone because most people think they lose their rankings. Because people don’t know about their new locations, so they lose business. But these effects are short term because I am sure you are advertising yourself that you have moved. Meaning now you are advertising your new url.

Search Engines are bit dumber then real people, so they need extra notification. That is why we are using 301 redirects above. Basically what that does for you is transfer all the link juice / link value from your old domain to a new domain. It can take anywhere from weeks to months for the link juice to be entirely transferred so be patient because it will transfer.

Keep your Old Location

As I mentioned above that being online makes it easy for us to keep our files on two separate locations. But I am not even saying that keep your files on other site as well. Just keep the domain, so the 301 redirect keep working. Google actually recommends you to keep the old domain for about 180 days, so you avoid confusion. I think keeping it forever is not very expensive. You are just paying $7 extra for registration fee. I think it is well worth it because you don’t know what people type. Also don’t forget that you have backlinks from so many other sites that haven’t changed the url to a new url. So you will lose all that traffic. So it is best to keep the old domain.

Bang Bang Advertisement – Get the words out

Let people know that you have moved. People used to know you with a different name, so you need to brand your new name even more, so when people remember you they remember your new name not your old one. So get on with advertising. You can use Yahoo Site Explorer to see your backlinks and then ask them to change it to your new site. Most will, but some won’t but this is a step toward making the link juice transfer part faster.