What NOT To Do

by AttorneySync

A lot of lawyers we talk to ask, “Why is my site not listed in Google?” or “Why am I ranked 50th in Google for my most popular keyword when I have paid to have my site optimized?”. While there is a laundry list of reasons why your site might not be ranking (including greedy law firm web marketing firms), too often the reason is that your website is being penalized.

How can you check whether your website is penalized/banned by a search engine?

Search Your URL

If you go to Google and enter the URL of your website you should see a listing of your various pages in google’s index. If you type in your URL and you get a message saying “Sorry, no information is available for the URL” then chances are your site is banned.

You can also use the advanced search operator “site:” to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, type:

site:www.yourdomain.com (where yourdomain is your URL).

The only other time you may receive this message is if your website is brand new and hasn’t been crawled by the search engines yet.

PageRank

You can also download the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) to see PageRank. If your website’s PageRank is a gray bar, then your website may be banned.

What NOT To DO

Perform optimizations from the point of view of Matt Cutts. If you can tell that your site has been optimized, chances are, so can the search engines. Here are some of the most common pitfalls:

No diversity in Anchor Text
To Many Backlinks Too Quickly
Keyword Stuffing
Title Tag, Meta Tag , Image Alt Tag Spamming
Duplicating Content
Hidden Text
Drastically Changing Your File Structure

What Do I Do Now?

If you suspect that your website may be suffering from a search engine penalty, we’re happy to talk to you about your options. We’ll perform a free review of your site and advise you as to whether your suffering penalties and how you can avoid them.

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