I have recently been really busy with a clients project when I came across a plea for help from another online associate. Her site was not showing up on Google anymore, and not just for keyword terms, but also when she entered in her websites URL into the search bar. This was terrible news for her because this was how she makes a good portion of her online sales. If you are like her and using Blogger or Wordpress for your website then you may not be aware of the fact that your site could easily be blacklisted by Google and the other search engines, just because of a couple of simple mistakes.
Missing or Broken Links
This is probably the easiest and quickest way to kill your search engine ranking and even get your website blacklisted from Google completely. Over time, you will build up a large list of links either to internal pages or other sites. Also over time, those links will die or the URLs will changes. This means that you now have references that are no longer valid and when Google sees that you are linking to dead pages it assumes that your page is not all that relevant anymore either. If you build up enough of these it can kill your site's rank and possibly send it to the blacklist of google's dark corner.
Good news there are easy ways to prevent and fix these issues. The first is to update the links to valid URLs, archive the old pages and post that content on your site if the other site no longer exists(Make sure to add proper attribution) or remove the link entirely. In order to find broken links, you can use the Broken Link Checker for WordPress, or for the blogger you can use Google's Webmaster tools to find broken or missing pages on your blog. Even if your site is blacklisted you still can access this page.
Bad or Malformed Anchor Text
If you don't know what the term Anchor Text is then don't worry because it is nothing too technical. It is just the text that is inside of a Link. This is the words you select when you create a new link on your site. Google can tell if the text you select for a link is relevant to the link you are creating. So if you have enough of these links that are naturally related or are what seems to be purposeful misrepresentations of what the link is linking to then you could be in for some really big trouble when it comes to your search engine rankings. Its no surprise that many sites will try to use some sort of trick to get people to click through to an affiliate or even on a PPC advertisement in order to earn a commission, however, this is probably the quickest ways to get you banned from many of Google's programs.
Article Marketing
Another in the line of Bad Anchor text is Article Marketing. The practice of article marketing is you create an article or a couple of articles that you then place on one or many other sites in the hopes that you will get click-throughs into your site. This can quickly get your site banned or blacklisted because of having duplicate content linking back to it or worse hosting duplicate articles. There is a better way to handle this in that you could offer to do Guest blog posts on other sites in order to get backlinks and traffic that is valid to the topic and ideas presented on your site. The key thing with anything you post on the internet is thinking about how you can best go about adding Value to your readers/viewers.
Keyword Hacking
Keyword Hacking or Keyword Stuffing is the practice that some sites will use when creating landing pages. Attempting to get the most amount of keywords into the smallest article possible. In past years this was actually quite effective at getting your site to the top of some of the search pages. However, it killed many more sites because of a poor level of quality content. Users would often complain about not being able to find any content that was useful. This lead to Google working on revising its spiders to see this trend on a site, and then take punitive steps against the ranking of that site. So if you have any articles like that on your site in the past. Quickly get them down.