Known Google filters and penalties

You probably have a Google penalty when your site (or an important page) suddenly disappeared from the index. You will recognize this by lower traffic and lower sales.
But if your site had a steady ranking (for a longtime) for a specific keyword phrase and suddenly the usual ranking drops ten or twenty pages, then this also sounds like a penalty.

But to be certain about this, first do some other ranking checks and visit the most important Webmaster forums and blogs, read some daily SEO feeds to see if this signal has happened to others too. Sometimes during a Google Dance (the moment Google is reindexing his servers), a large rise and fall in rankings can follow for a few days. A new algorithm implementation can also have this effect.

But if there is no explicable reason for a large drop down (or a removal from the index) of your ranking, then you should think about a possible penalty.

The first thing you should NOT do is contacting Google immediately.

If you have a Google Webmaster account then they probably will contact you with a message if your site has been manual excluded from the index.

Look for Perceived Penalties

If not banned from the index, start looking for perceived penalties:

  • Host Server is/was down or having problems during crawl, so pages are not indexed
  • Robots.txt is blocking the spiders from indexing your site
  • Problems with crawlers
  • Domain name problems (DNS, CNAME, problems?)
  • Lost links causes ranking to drop
  • Rankings drop because other sites are better or have more links
  • Rankings drop because of a search engine algorithm shift
  • Research your logs (site analytics) to find out if there is any unusual activity from a certain moment. If so, try to find out which changes you did before these significant changes.
  • Contact your host to find out if they are aware of any problems.
  • Check your competitor’s ranking to see if they have changed too.

If you still didn’t found any reason, then start to find actual (manual) penalties. First check Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to see if any unethical practice is related to your site. Google doesn’t publicly acknowledge the existence of actual penalties (unless the reason was obvious or part of their guidelines), but we all know they exists. Therefore it is impossible to offer a hard-and-fast rule that can help you look for penalties.

Known Google penalty filters

  • Duplicated content filter
  • Bad linking filter (linking to bad neighborhood)
  • Cross-linking penalty (site A–>B–>C–>A)
  • Excessive use of same (inbound) anchor text
  • Excessive use of reciprocal linking
  • Thin affiliate site (many links to affiliates, hardly added value content)
  • Keyword stuffing
  • Over optimization penalty
  • Hidden text or links penalty
  • Automated page redirects (meta refresh with 0 seconds)
  • Link buying or selling penalty

Conclusion

If you practice SEO the way search engines want you to do (by following their quality guidelines), then you don’t have to be afraid to get penalized by automatic filters or manual penalties. I know, some people don’t agree with these strict rules, but unfortunately we don’t have any choice. I also like to speed on the highway when no other traffic is there, but still can lose my license for that.

Keep the guidelines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and my list Wrong Web design and Bad SEO Practice always in your mind when developing or updating your websites. Build your website for the human being, not for some artificial undefeatable algorithm monster. This can only lead to SEO nightmares.