Yes, Google penalizes “thin content with little or no added value”, as you will see in the screenshots below. According to an official statement from Google, “Some webmasters attempt to improve their pages’ ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content. Google will take action against domains […]

Yes, infinite spaces can prevent search engines from identifying important content. According to Google, if Googlebot reaches infinite space URLs, that “could result in Googlebot failing to completely index the real content on your site.” source Google also recommends: “use the robots.txt file on your web server to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of […]

Rel=”canonical” is not a direct ranking factor, but it can influence rankings  either negatively or positively (depending on the implementation), because rel=”canonical” is a hint that Google honors strongly (watch John Mueller explaining how Google can ignore it, when content the linked URLs are not duplicate or near-duplicates). Used to consolidate duplicate content, PageRank, links […]

Yes, according to the following official statement from Google: “Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that may violate our guidelines: text advertisements that pass PageRank” source In the past, Google penalized major brands for this practice, so if you’re still accepting follow links in exchange for something valuable, be careful.

While there’s no duplicate content penalty (official Google statement source), having a significant portion of the website flagged by Google as duplicate content (i.e. 50%+), can lower the quality of the entire website. This will negatively affect the ability of the quality pages to rank where they would deserve. You need to properly consolidate your […]

Yes, comment spam (for the purpose of getting backlinks to your site) is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, as stated by Google’s Matt Cutts: “If your primary link building strategy is to leave comments all over the web to the degree that you know you’ve got a huge fraction of your link portfolio in comments and […]

Yes, according to Google’s official documents: “Creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines. Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that may violate our guidelines: […] Advertorials or native advertising where […]

Is abusing rich snippets markup against Google’s guidelines? Yes, according to one Google employee, abusing rich snippets is a negative signal, and a penalty is possible if caught (either manually or algorithmically). Q: “Even though Google offers no Rich Snippets for category pages, I regularly encounter such results containing Rich Snippets for listing and category […]

Yes, according to an official Google statement, injecting ads or pop-ups is a negative ranking factor. Google will penalize anyone for: “injecting new ads or pop-ups on pages, or swapping out existing ads on a webpage with different ads; or promoting or installing software that does so” source. As a matter of fact, do anything weird with […]

Tempering with browser’s home page or settings is a negative search ranking factor and has a very strong chance to trigger a penalty. According to Google: “Changing a user’s browser homepage or search preferences without the user’s informed consent” is a form of malicious behavior.” source Of course, Google’s web-browser  – Chrome – having about 67% […]