Bellow are some techniques which may reduce your Google ranking or even ban you from its index. You should avoid them if possible.

Bad navigation

Your website must have clean and simple navigation. This way you ensure that Googlebot will be able to crawl your entire site. Navigation links should be located near the top of the pages since this makes it easy for your visitors and Googlebot to navigate through your site.
Best bet for navigation is use of text links, as this increases word count and keyword density, as well as giving description of destination page to Googlebot. Googlebot is also able to follow image links and from recently Flash navigation links. If you use image links make sure you add some description in “alt” attribute of image tag to describe your link.

JavaScript links

Googlebot is not able (currently) to follow JavaScript links. People often use these type of links for fancy navigation. If you use them just make sure you have alternative navigation using HTML links.

Hidden text

Googlebot and other robots learned to recognize this method several years ago. So if you don’t want to be identified as spammer and banned from SERP’s, don’t use this method.

Hidden links

Number of incoming links to certain page has direct effect to Google PageRank (PR). However, if those are hidden that may produce similar results as with hidden text.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a search engine optimization method where you serve highly optimized page version to robots and a regular page to your visitors. Official Google policy is that cloaked pages will not be allowed in their index. However, there are many websites that use cloaking with great success. So if you like to risk getting banned from SERP’s you may use this method, just make sure you do it properlyJ

Guest book spamming and FFA pages

Adding your link to hundreds of guest books will not help you with your PR, since it appears that Google is able to detect them and ignores outgoing links completely. This way you’ll save yourself many hours of useless work.
When PR was initially introduced, many SEO companies were offering to “submit your site to zillion FFA pages for free” and hopefully increase your PR. I don’t remember that this used to work at time and it certainly doesn’t work now. If you find any of these, avoid them.

Sessions

Google is not able to accept session cookies and will try avoiding URL based sessions. Also, you should use fewer parameters in you dynamic URLs and avoid use “id” parameter as Googlebot may think that is session ID.

Author: Ilir Fekaj
Last update: January 15, 2005