What Does Google Penalize You For?

[Ben]

Hi all,

W hat does google penalize you for?

I hear that things such as linking to all of your sites on the same server and having non-relevant links can score you minus points with google, but everyone seems to do it.

What can and cant you do?!!!

Im quite confused as everything I seem to read is contradictory.

Thanks

Ben

[Mr. Tech]

Hey Ben,

Google lists their guidelines here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

They are intentionally not crystal clear because to do so would give too many clues as to how the algo works.

Let me also add one more link that I think you'll find interesting. This leads to an article at Search Engine Journal.

Google and the History of Link Building

[Peter Sinclair]

Google very rarly penalizes a site. However Google 'devalued' certain ranking criteria and values others higher.

So if you are not ranked high it does not mean you are penalized it just means you are using tecchniques which have less value then others.

High value:
Incoming non related links from related web sites
Outbound non reciprocal links to related content
Short focused titles
Unique content
Text link navigation
Proper HTML Coding
Topic focused web sites (themed)
Static URL's

Low value
Keyword stuffing in title and body
Meta tags
Reciprocal links
Duplicate content
Little or no content
Graphic link navigation
ASP / PHP
Keyword stuffed URL's
Query Strings

Difficult to spider
Frames
Flash
ASP

Potential Penalization for
Stuffing page with unrelated Keywords
FFA Sites
Hidden Content/Links
Shadow domains
Cloaking

Hope that helps!

[Ben]

Wow, thanks guys

[Tojan3]

There is one thing that I would mention - over optimization.
If you use every seo technique possible, google most probably will penalize you.
i find that this happens and it's not very scarce.

Peter Sinclair. on what base did you separate seo techniques to HIgh and low value?
That it's really interesting.

[Peter Sinclair]

Welcome Tojan3,

To be honest I found this list a while ago and added a few more to it. Just a matter of knowing what the SE's like and what they don't like as much.

Peter

[Mr. Tech]

Was browsing another forum and came across this:

I put up a new page over a week ago and decided to use a background graphic (which has now been removed). Since I don't normally use background images, I forgot to set the page's background color to black. So, naturally, my page didn't appear in Google because I had white-on-white text.

I had to wait 3 days after removing the background (got complaints about it anyway) and resetting the page font to black (against a white background). The page is now showing up in Google.

For this particular domain, I've been getting content into Google within 4-5 days because they are crawling us frequently. So, I was able to realize quickly I had made a fundamental mistake and fix it.

Google has become very adept at catching those simple spammy tactics and carefully filtering your improper content out of search results. They did NOT penalize the rest of my site, most likely because this was obviously a mistake. That is, the site did not require human review. Their indexing algorithm probably checked the value of my domain, saw that it has a lot of good content, and just filtered the one page on the basis of its own design.

So, as soon as I fixed the page, the next crawl got it into the index processing queue again, and this time it passed the filter.

[Darksat]

Black hat techniques are a lot more sophisticated than that today and google isnt that good at picking them up.