Google Offers Free Hosts Advice on Being Penalty Free

A few days ago an interesting joint article was posted on Google Webmaster Blog. The post came from the Search Quality Team and was talking about having a valuable free hosting service.

Last year, there was an unfortunate incident when free hosting services banned their sites from the Google search index. In fact, this happened more than once. This took place because these services allowed almost anything. Thus, Google believed that the majority of those sites using the free hosting services weren’t observing the Google terms of service. Thus, the solution was to remove those sites and their services from the Google index.

Google actually declared that if it’s necessary, they won’t back off from banning hosts. So they did with co.cc. Now this free hosting service is back. Therefore, the above mentioned blog post was written for the free hosting companies so as to prevent them from banning and penalty. Some of the tips from this article are:

-          Users must be aware of your abuse policy. That’s why it has to be very clear. For instance, the sign – up procedure might present the abuse policy. This way, everyone will know what spammy activity means.

-          The free hosting service must be monitored for spam signals such as JavaScript code, redirections, spammy keywords or various ad blocks. A cost effective and simple solution is offered by Google Alerts or the site operator.

-          Some verification tools like CAPTCHAs are necessary for the sign – up form. This way, you’ll have only human submissions. Moreover, the automated scripts won’t be able to generate sites on your service. These methods are not 100% secure, but they will help you get rid of a few bad actors.

-          The signups must be kept under control. Also, the typical spam patterns must be discovered. The most common are the user – agents and user names used during signup, the numerous requests coming from an identical IP address or the form completion time. Even though these solutions are not conclusive, they can help.

-          Some sanity checks are required. For instance, you might discover hundreds of legitimate Japanese sites on a free hosting service in Polish. These sites will be especially created for your service. There are numerous useful language detection tools. Among them we can include Google Translate API v2 and the language detection libraries.

-          You must control the free hosting service and keep it clear from malware – infected pages and phishing. A tool like Google Safe Browsing API can test your URLs. It can even send you alerts when a link looks suspicious.

-          The log files must also be monitored so as to observe sudden traffic spikes. Whenever a new site has such traffic, you can see why it’s using more processing power and bandwidth.

-          If you’re having a free hosting service, you must also pay close attention to sudden activity spikes. Usually, these sorts of spikes relate to a spam attack that’s already taking place.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

Last updated by Tom Parling at 04/05/2012.