20 Dec 08 All about Google – Easy, Simple and Effective Part 3

As a member of several SEO/Wed Development Forums, I’ve seen a lot of “Google Penalized” threads appearing all over the place. In fact there’s a couple, if I’ve counted correctly that just rocked up on DP today. I want to dedicate this entire post to explain to you on what grounds Google will/can/should penalize your site.

Google Penalization
Q: What is the “Google Penalty”?
A: It’s simple. When you try to cheat the system, or do something you’re not meant to Google will “punish” you and this will effect everything from the behavior of your visitors (to a lesser extent) to your monthly earnings (to a greater extent)

Q: How can the penalty affect me?
A: Well for starters, you will be deranked. Meaning you are likely to be completely kicked of the Google Search Engine if the committed “crime” is bad, i.e. using extensive blackhat techniques. However, alot of things can happen through this penalty which isn’t limited to anything from loosing SERPs to being banished from the G-Empire. It just depends how serious your crime was.

Q: What reasons can Google use to penalize me?
A: The answer to this question is mainly common sense. Much like this thread itself. Google will punish you if do the “wrong thing” but it seems that most of us, have trouble figuring out between wrong and right at times. So, let’s clear some things out! Below is a list of the most commonly used reasons behind the Google Penalization… it’s not surprising to see most of them in the list, like I said it’s just common sense.

~ Usage of BlackHat Techniques – Search the forums, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. BlackHat SEO Techniques involve “cheating” the system or finding loopholes and exploiting them. This will allow you to get great SERP boost but won’t last for long, they will find you out!

~Usage of GreyHat Techniques – Similar to BlackHat but the damage isn’t as bad. It’s like a less “bad” version of the BlackHat technique but you can still be penalized. Google will only accept WhiteHat SEO Techniques and you should stick to it too!

~ Content Duplication – This not only applies to Google and other search engines, but to us in general life too. If you copy/rip-off other peoples work, work they’ve spent time and effort to create you will be punished. It’s a form of stealing; you wouldn’t steal now would you?

~ Purchasing Links from other Sites – One of the most discussed “link building” techniques is this. People all around the internet purchase links from higher PR and niche-related sites to gain quick authority. However, the unspoken truth is that it’s against the Google TOS, so if they catch you – you will have to face the music.

~ Invalid URL Redirection – I talked about 301/302 URL Forwarding in the earlier FAQ and how important it was, well this is why. If you shift sites and don’t set up the redirection properly – when the incy-wincy Google spider comes along, it won’t realize the shift – resulting in your “new URL” to be treated as a new website al-together, loosing it’s backlinks, PR and authority!

~ Keyword Stuffing – Its name speaks for itself, if you stuff your website with keywords to please the crawlers, it will look bad to real human visitors, and eventually to Google as well. You should “sprinkle” your page with targeted keywords not flood it! Keywords are important, it helps direct the “right” visitors to your site and helps “target” your Adsense adverts. The more targeted the ads, the more clicks you will get.

~ Un-natural Link Building – This is the least of your worries, It’s true that there are penalties for websites building a lot of links in an “unnatural” way in a short time, but I don’t think it will effect normal and legitimate webmasters like ourselves . If you site contains real, unique content and a legitimate product, and should be able to build links naturally without any problems on the search engines. This “reason” mainly focuses on spammers, scrapers, or people who own a lot of domains and start “inter-linking”

Q: I just got penalized! Now what?
A: Well you can’t do much, just spend the time rebuilding and regaining the “mutual trust” between you and Google, which you once had. You can contact them, but unless your sites extremely popular, I wouldn’t bother cause neither would they.

Q: Can Google penalize me for using Auto-Surfers?
A: Obviously, it can’t be good. I’ve researched this question extensively but couldn’t find an exact answer. Then again, common sense will tell us it cannot do anything but harm. Surely “fake” views of Google Ads won’t be something to be proud of. Avoid them as much as possible, frankly you shouldn’t even be using them for anything – imitating “person’s” surfing can’t be for a good cause.

Tags: blackhat, content, duplication, engine, google, greyhat, invalid, keyword, penalty, redirection, search, SEO, SERP, stuffing, submission, url, whitehat