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SECTION 18 - Google Penalties and How To Avoid Them

1. Google Penalties and How To Avoid Them

One of the most unpleasant factors of Google's algorithm is the aspect of penalty. It puts almost all the webmasters to chronic anxiety. The main reason behind this being the uncertainty behind it as no one knows what will elicit the giant's wrath.

Secondly, there is a lack of clarity with regard to the causes of penalties and types of penalties and their application. In this situation all that one could do is to use the general principles of optimization techniques and abide stringently to the stipulations of Google's webmaster rules.

By diligently maneuvering those common penalty triggers can assure certain guarantee regarding better results and regarding avoiding penalties. Because any oversight in this area will lead to potential loss of revenue and severe damage to your online business.

The primary concern of this section is to then see how to understand these penalties and how to avoid them effectively.

2. Google Penalties and How To Avoid Them - What are Some of Google's Penalties?

Penalties are one of the conventional ways of keeping a system under control. Google too uses such conventional controls. It uses a range of penalties that slides from the lightest to the most severe form of punishments depending on the nature of the offence and on the frequency of the breaches.

The period of penalty varies in length it may be anywhere between three months to the complete banning from the Google index in the most severe form of punishment.

Loss of PageRank

The effects or the implications of penalties are highly relative. It is highly dependent on the status of the page when it receives the penalty. For instance, a loss of one point might push a PR3 page to PR2, it may not be as bad as that same loss of one point that pushes a page from PR6 to PR5, because Google's scale is not a linear scale. It is rather exponential in its rise therefore loss in the lower end might be less damaging than when the loss takes place at the higher end. It takes ten times harder effort to move a page from PR5 to PR6 than it would take to move a PR2 page to PR3. In moving up the Google ladder every succeeding rung gets ten times tougher.

Another most severe form of punishment is to lose one's pagerank entirely. It might also have carry on effect on the site in its efforts to gain back its position. SEO professionals debate on this however. Yet another cruel punishment is the greyed pagerank indicator. When this happens, one has to understand that your site has a major problem. Others will be careful to avoid such sites as it might inflict penalties on them as well.

Other penalties include, search engine results placement drop for their most important targeted keywords, it costs the website owners money and loss of business.

The ultimate punishment that is dreaded by the webmasters is the complete banning of the website. In some cases the ban may be temporary but most often than not it is permanent.

3. Google Penalties and How To Avoid Them - What Activities can Result in a Google Penalty?

Google's Terms of service can be found in http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html , and webmasters guidelines can be found in http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html . These pages gives clear guidelines and conditions that have to be strictly followed by a site to be indexed in Google.

One of the major concerns of Google is to see to that webmasters should not try to trick the search engines through their optimization techniques.

Link Farms

Link farms try to increase pagerank by exchanging links between themselves and also with entirely unrelated websites to increase the pagerank. Google does not penalize you if for incoming links as you really do not have any control over who links to you. However Google also understands that you have full control over the outgoing links. If you have linked to link farms to increase your pagerank and link popularity, then Google considers it a cause for penalty.

Other Don'ts from Google

Hidden text, cloaking, sneaky redirects are some of the other factors that elicit Google penalty.

Google also disapproves unauthorized computerized and automated programs used to submit your site and pages and for checking search rankings.

If you have been using are planning to use the web tool Web Position Gold (TM), you must immediately shun the thought. As these programs spend a large amount of computing time and space, it is considered as violation of the terms of service. Google bans any automated queries.

Use of keywords that are not relevant to the context of the web page is to be discouraged without any second thought. As such practice betrays the page's attempt to rank well for search terms that necessarily has nothing to do with the web page or the website.

Some webmasters in order to increase the web pages content have the practice of duplicating the content forcing the search engines to list more entries on the results page for searches. Such a practice Google's guidelines clearly states that such practices are never to be entertained.

Door-way pages, yet another taboo in Google algorithm. These are pages that are packed with all possible keywords that attract the search query and that guides the visitor traffic to desired pages without their knowledge. This type of sneaky redirects are clearly forbidden and it incurs severe penalty.

In order to keep the spammers under control Google reserves the right to change its algorithm at any time and as frequently as it wants. Google for this reason guards the inner dynamics of its algorithm as secret. Spam sites prevent the deserving sites gain high results, to avoid this Google is constantly combating the spammers.

4. Google Penalties and How To Avoid Them - What Can you do about Search Engine Spam ?

Spam sites are a disgraceful menace of the Internet culture. To fight against this menace Google provides a spam report page that facilitates the reporting of the illegal and unethical websites and web pages. All that you have to do is to provide the name and the URL of the site that you suspect has violated the Google algorithm. Google investigates every reported case or at least claims to do so. This helps Google to rework its algorithm and curb the abuses in those specified areas.

If you are a good quality website with stipulated rules stringently followed, observing the terms and guidelines, you have no reason to fear about the penalties and filters. Google's penalties and filters are then to your advantage because it clears your path to high ranking and link popularity as Google's penalties and filters are aimed at spam sites that engage in unethical practices.

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