3 things that will make Google penalize you for pagerank or Link fraud

Cross linking all your sites or blogs: Dont try to cross link your sites or blogs inorder to boost your Google PR. Back in 2005, I had about 9 blogs. Some of pr 1, about two with a pagerank of 2 and of course some with a pagerank of 0. Inorder to raise their pageranks, I decided to link to all my blogs from each one of them. A few weeks later, all the blogs lost all their pagerank.

Buying tons of links: Never buy 500 links or submission to 150 directories because if you do, it will send a signal to the Google spam filters that your site should be in the sandbox especially if it is a new site. Focus on getting links from blogs, forums and Authority sites that are related to your site.

Replicating the same content: Google has content filters and will make sure it drops any multiple contents you have (especially if they are linked to each other, or linked to from thesame website.)
If you have to post a single article more than once, make sure you reword atleast 40% of the content, completely change the title and the first few paragraphs of the article.

Dont be lazy.

Discuss on blogs, forums, email bloggers, write and update your site all the time and do some web2.0 marketing. But DO NOT SPAM because it will come back to you.

I have a site about african entertainment which is now 2 years old. I have been link building slowly with blogs, forums and article posts, I was even lucky to be featured in some tech blogs. With the recent Google pagerank update, the site is now a solid PR 3. This is considering we haven't been sending PR releases or asking to be featured. We are totally focussed on rolling out the product.

Happy Birthday to the African TV project.

Change with the search!

If you have been following any web marketing firm's website or any search marketer's blog lately, you would have by now come across Google's change (or overhaul) of it's search technology.

It's time for SEO to change too. Shortly, Web companies like ours that rely mostly on organic search traffic will have to change their ways of thinking. New tests will have to be run, new analysis and more.

My company is doing well on search engines and most especially on Google, we've beaten most of the big guys to get to where we are and we get atimes more than 1500 monthly visitors from Google alone. Upto now, we haven't spent a dime on marketing, or atleast promotion.

In preparation, I went to the Google caffeine sandbox page (not sure if that's what it is called) to test the new search technology, to see if I can notice any changes to search results. I was too late to arrive because from the message I found on the page, Google is done testing it, they think it will work and have taken it off the developer test page.

My guess is, the technology may have some LSI built into it, atleast more than what we have already seen (or atleast think we have).

If any of you has used Google caffeine in test, we would love to have your thoughts here. Just comment on this post.