Tempted to try to boost your search engine rankings with “search optimization”? Don’t be. Attempting to manipulate your Google search ranking could lead your web site being sent to the Google sin bin, or Google Hell, as it’s known.

There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to search optimization. The industry works on the premise that by making adjustments to your web site, and arranging back links, you can improve your rank on search engines, including Google, to get more traffic to your site.

However, this strategy can backfire. 

A recent Forbes report highlighted the case of Paul Sanar, a 21-year-old online entrepreneur who says his online diamond business was selling more than $3 million of jewelry a year before his site was banished to Google Hell. Sanar relied largely Google for his traffic.

Whenever someone typed in a term like “diamonds” or “engagement ring” into Google, Sanar’s site appeared in the first few pages. However, sometime around September 2006, Sanar’s site was demoted to Google’s supplemental index, also known as Google Hell.

Suddenly the traffic stopped coming in, and Sanar’s sales dropped by $500,000 in three months.

Generally speaking, Google puts low-grade web sites and pages into the supplemental index. Web pages in the supplemental index appear lower in searches, and are indexed less-regularly by Google’s spider.

Sanar attributes his site’s demotion to work undertaken by a marketing consultant to improve his site’s Google ranking. Apparently, the consultant duplicated content on many of the site’s pages, causing Google to think that the site was full of spam. Even after Sanar reversed the changes, he was not able to get his web site out of Google Hell.

So what’s the key takeaway?

If you’re going to build an online business that relies on Google for its traffic, be aware that trying to artificially improve your Google rankings, may actually have the opposite result.

Just remember, Google giveth, but it can also taketh away.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 5:07 pm under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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