1. **Will SEO lead to Google banning my site?**
Websites hoping to increase traffic through SEO often worry about being penalized or banned by Google for suspected cheating. Understanding Google's mission and values can help alleviate this concern. Google is an online advertising company, and its revenue growth depends on the volume of its platforms, which in turn relies on user engagement. Therefore, Google's core value is to provide more useful services to users. As long as the content you provide is valuable to users and aligns with Google's values, your site will not be banned.
2. **Objective Analysis**
To increase traffic from search engines, the first step in website optimization is to ensure Google indexes your site’s pages. The second step is to improve your site’s ranking in search results. Below, we will discuss how to get Google to index your pages and how to improve your site’s position in search results.
3. **Objective Breakdown**
**3.1 How does Google find your site?**
To be indexed by Google, your site must first be discovered by Google. There are three main ways Google finds websites:
a. When someone using the Google Toolbar visits your site, if it hasn’t been indexed yet, Google will analyze the information returned by the toolbar to determine the site's popularity and then crawl it.
b. Links from other websites. If another site has already been indexed by Google and contains a link to your site, Google can discover your site through hyperlink analysis.
c. When users query your site using the "site:" command, Google may also actively index your site.
**3.2 Improving your site’s ranking in search results**
**3.2.1 Ranking factors used by Google:**
a. The famous PageRank technology, which evaluates the importance of webpages linking to your site. However, based on experience, the role of this technology is diminishing over time.
b. The number of pages indexed on your site. A webpage hosted on a site with only hundreds of indexed pages is far less likely to be found by search engines compared to one on a site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. For example, during a test lasting over a month, a page with somewhat adult content received fewer than one visit per day when hosted on a site with only a few hundred indexed pages, while the same page on a site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages received around 100 visits per day, consistently.
c. User interaction data. Google assumes that if a webpage isn't important enough for users to bookmark but still attracts repeat visits, users are likely to search for it again via search engines. Thus, user clicks on search results act as votes for a webpage’s popularity, a method even more aligned with user needs than PageRank.
**3.2.2 Strategies to address ranking factors:**
a. Improving PageRank: In essence, gaining user favor naturally boosts PageRank. For instance, a popular content ranking page on a site might have no external links and only one internal link, but due to high user engagement, it could achieve a PageRank score of 5. However, as mentioned earlier, this score is becoming less significant.
b. Increasing the number of indexed pages: Don’t assume that simply putting a site online guarantees indexing by search engines. Social networking sites (SNS) and blogs often suffer from broken links between sites, making it difficult for search engines to crawl them. Not all links are counted during hyperlink analysis.
- Avoid broken links between pages. Blog designs often inadvertently create broken links, especially for inactive users who cannot be reached from the homepage. A solution is to add a user index page similar to a Yellow Pages directory.
- Google processes links starting from an initial page, collecting up to three levels of links (excluding the starting page), and then handles all links collectively. Relative static links do not count against the limit, but redirects and rewrites are counted twice (if page A links to B via a redirect, the redirect consumes one step, leaving only one additional step). All links are sorted and processed based on the importance of the starting page. If processing capacity is insufficient, some links may be skipped during hash-based processing. This means links requiring recalculation (excluding static relative addresses) may fail to form effective loops with interlinked pages, resulting in fewer crawls. Additionally, question marks in URLs may cause processing errors because they are treated as macros. To ensure a page B (already indexed by Google) is always indexed, there should be multiple paths connecting it within three steps from a page A. This is not about doorway pages; rather, it involves ensuring sufficient connections, such as direct links, reciprocal links, or internal links (e.g., "back to top"). Many blog systems naturally achieve this because their log pages typically include links to recent posts. This explains why certain forum systems like DVBBS may have fewer indexed pages due to poor link structures. Improving this requires generating direct links at the page creation stage, avoiding redirects that hinder indexing. Since Google treats each pair of tags as a separate page, systems like oblog may see pages repeatedly counted, even if the actual content is limited. Despite this, having a large total number of pages increases the likelihood of being found by search engines, so selecting the right system can enhance visibility.
**3.3 Core principle: Providing valuable content**
Aligning with Google's values is key to increasing search engine traffic. Useful content helps users return to your site via search engines, effectively voting for your site. From current experience, direct visits via search engines carry more weight than those via the Google Toolbar. Ironically, content with slight adult themes tends to attract traffic effectively, as users frequently search for such content without bookmarking it. Content-heavy sites, such as blogs or forums, benefit from flattening content into calendar-like structures (e.g., channel homepage → calendar page → daily content list → individual content page). This ensures historical content remains accessible and easily indexed. Based on past experiences, sites with millions of indexed pages, particularly social news sites, attract approximately 10 search engine visits per indexed content page. Channels with 200,000 indexed pages receive roughly 20,000 daily visits via search engines, stabilizing after about three months of structural optimization. User-generated content, such as blogs or forums, sees ratios ranging from 20:1 to 30:1, primarily due to low-weight replies. Early use of tools for data collection and editorial refinement can yield excellent results.