Many small business owners are suddenly out of business when Google bans their website. There are many reasons why Google does this, but the two most common are 'black hat' SEO tricks, and not changing the content. All search engines continually watch for websites that do not change their content. Most websites that have not changed for three months can expect to be dumped from the searches.

Most sites that are banned have made unwitting mistakes. The thing that webmasters need to understand is that a website can be dropped from the searches without ever being banned. There are several ways for a website to slip between the cracks.

Updating Regularly

One way to be forgotten is to create a static web-brochure and forget it. This type of web marketing fails both for search engines and for the general public. Search engines know that people will not return to a web site unless things change, or they can expect to have their needs met. This does not mean that all ecommerce businesses need to invest in forums and chat rooms.

It does mean that the home page should change, articles be added, and some older page be updated. A 'new articles' or 'featured articles' is one way to encourage visitors to visit again. This is important as the search engines track visitors and their habits. Websites that have return visitors, and hundreds of thousands of hits will rank higher than websites that do not attract return visitors - even if they were professionally optimized.

Internal Links

Many websites have pages that are not linked to the main page. This is usually the result of multi-level navigation systems. This results in pages that are not part of the navigation system. They may be secondary landing pages or exit pages. But some search engines may see these as doorway pages, something search engines penalize severely.

Creating a site map will fix this problem.

Inbound Links

This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of building Page Rank. Many ecommerce businesses have come to believe that 'the more the better.' Web masters are learning to avoid link directories, but they are still overloading their pages with links.

One of the biggest mistakes is putting all the site's links on every page. This is not necessary. There are many link menus that only pertain to certain pages. While these menus are considered 'internal' by small business owners, they are considered 'external' or 'inbound' by search engines which rank Pages and not Websites.

Quality is more important than quantity. There are sites with 500 inbound links that generate PageRank 4 or PR4 while other sites with 10 000 links still have PR3.

Too Little Content

Search engines are also designed to watch out for pages that have too little content. These pages are seen as link farm pages, or doorway pages. If there is a page with high graphics and low content, then consider using 'no=follow' codes leading to it. This will let search engines avoid the page, and eliminate it from their ranking system.

Unique Meta Tags

This became a problem when sites started using Content Management Systems. Webmasters stopped using unique meta tags on every page. This lead a backlog of hundreds of pages with no meta tags, or the exact same meta tags.

These problems make it difficult for search engines to index content, and leads to a website being ignored by search engines