SEO Penalties Revisited

Posted by Miles Evans

Maintaining top SERP rankings is a full time job. Chances are you have watched your hard earned rankings plummet before and know the agony involved in determining why it occurred. So what are some of the main penalties and causes for losing a stellar ranking? Several factors old and new apply.

• Competition. The most obvious reason for losing rankings is simply that your competitors are outgunning you by obtaining more trusted and properly formed links than you are. As a good measure always be sure to track at least some of your competition’s keyword progress. It is nice to know who to keep an eye on, and with some hard work and clever linking, you may just end up becoming allies.
• Too many reciprocal links. The days of automated reciprocal link bombing are behind us. If 90% of your links are reciprocal or not one-way links, they might be doing you more harm than good - especially with Google. Targeted reciprocal links are a decent way to build a foundation and get the spiders visiting, but aside from that they don’t accomplish much.
• Duplicate content pages are removed from the Google index. This one has been beaten to death and while some people say it isn’t much of a factor, I can see from my own testing that it isn’t always that accurate/fair to publishers. Todd has a great write-up on avoiding the dupe filters. On that note, you should also always choose to redirect your www or non www domain.
• Subdomains. The search engines view each subdomain as a different entity. For this reason it is also wise to structure a site like domain.com/forum rather than forum.domain.com.
• Crawlability. Again, the best way to overcome crawling issues is by using Google Sitemaps - and while you're at it constructing a Yahoo sitemap as well. In your Google Sitemaps account you can see specific crawl info including any errors. Google Sitemaps made some changes late last year so you may want to take a look at it again.
• 404, 403, 500 and other script based errors will remove your pages from the index. If swaths of pages are not there to be crawled or are spitting errors this is an obvious quality issue. We know Google monitors some of this via sitemaps so it makes sense they might potentially penalize for it as well. I mean aside from removing those pages from the index. The point is to always maintain quality listings.
• Accessibility. This never seems to get mentioned much. One of the lesser known SEO tricks I learned way back, was to always make a site accessible - to spiders, users, and for those with disabilities. This means descriptive title and alt tags, or title tags on all of your menu links at the very least. And again always deploy a proper sitemap strategy and correct linking within your site. There is an increased quality score associated with a fully accesible website, so why not go for it? Google admits this is something they watch in their webmaster guidelines. Alistapart has a great read on site accesibity for seo.
• Google’s supplemental results. If your site ends up in the supplemental results there is little chance of you appearing in the search results, therefore, your SERP traffic will be way down. This one gets a lot of airplay as it has begun to affect a lot of users. Most people report being able to avoid the supps through proper accessibility and onsite SEO combined with, you guessed it, a proper sitemap.
• The Google +/-30 penalty. Peter at v7n gives a good report on this one. I’ve personally seen this on some of my best earners and test domains recently. Many people have reported that their rankings drop +/-30 spots and many are stonewalled at this position for some time. Check this thread at WMW for some dicussion.
• The Google 950 penalty. Somewhat like the penalty above. People are noticing their pages fall to within the last 950 results from top positions. There are some examples floating around - again WMW has the discussion covered here, and here.
• Grey bar in the Google toolbar. You have been doing something spammy and removed from the Google index. This is akin to having your testicles ripped off and being forced to eat them. Seriously, you can resubmit your site after correcting the problem, but why would you bother? Game over dude.
• Loss of Pagerank. In most cases a loss of Pagerank is due to excessive linking from the page in question. Fluctuations in PR are to be expected so I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. For serious.
• Bad neighborhood links. Links from cheesy directories, link farms, and splogs don’t do you any good. The same holds true for linking to them. As always avoid the snake-oil at all costs, which leads me to...
• The obvious ones: keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages, misshaped redirects, cloaking, and other oldskool blackhat tactics will quickly get you in trouble - and out of the SERPs.

Hope this helps. If it did you could always grant us a digg ;)

Posted Feb 01, 2007 at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!