Search Engine Penalties

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April 10th, 2009 by Dan

The term penalty can also be applied to things that are not penalties in SEO. You will know you have been penalised if a search engine punishes you and how they do this is to lower your listing on their index, or worse, remove it completely for a period of time. However, a website that doesn’t have the goods to rank well in the first place can hardly cry penalty.

Over optimisation can sometimes cause a real penalty. Trying too hard can have its pitfalls. You are probably over optimising if huge changes are made in a short space of time or if you have your key phrases all over, in your title, in the directory name, in the filename, domain and sub domain and in too high a density in the content. If it is the only text that is used for other sites to link with you it results in the search engine thinking you are trying to cheat and you could be pushed down the list.

Black Hat penalties are possibly the best understood reason for penalties. Search engines will severely punish any site caught using these tactics. One in particular is the ‘orphaned’ page. This is a page which has no internal links point to it. Quite often it is done accidentally, but most often webmasters apply this tactic to trick a search engine.

Paid links are considered ‘gaming the system’ by some search engines. Paid adverts are fine, paid links are not. Paid links contain no other text and are not relevant to the page they are on. Keyword stuffing or hidden text can also result in a penalty. Major search engines sometimes inform you if you are being penalised and other times you may drop from the listings without any warning. The best way to avoid penalties is to bring in a professional SEO agency to develop a strategy which follows the rules and minimises the chances of a penalty. There are no guarantees, but a reputable SEO company can help you maximise your chances of SEO success.

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