Google Penalties Are For Everyone!

It's true. Don't think you're special just because you got penalized in Google. Everybody's doing it. Kind of part of the growth process for an online enterprise. So get used to it.

Learn. Read. Unwind.

When SEO Failure Results In Google Penalties Or Rank Suppression

It's a sad fact that the most severe Google penalties are triggered by seos.  While many site owners inadvertently trigger rank issues, the real damage is done by the professionals.  This is caused by a number of factors, among them the fact that what worked yesterday may trigger penalties today.  In many respects the rules are changing faster than the ability of the seos to keep up.

The goal of this site is to provide insight and a platform for discussion on the possible causes and solutions for the myriad Google penalty environments we see daily.

All websites, whether a small blog or a large e-commerce enterprise, are vulnerable to actions taken by search engines without warning.  The web environment is clearly not without risk, and those risks may be outsized compared to our knowledge of them.  For example, most penalized sites are not penalized due to black hat or intentional violations of the best practices guidelines published by Google.  By far and away, the sites that are suppressed in the natural search fall into non-compliance completely inadvertently, and sometimes because of the actions of third parties.

While Google has made large advances in its spam detection capabilities, they still require human intervention to keep their results clean and relevant, because the number of players seeking to game the system is constantly growing and throwing new challenges their way.  Many penalties result from hackers commandeering ranks from existing sites by directly hacking or otherwise influencing Google's index.

And in some cases, Google is the cause of the problem.  One case in point is paid links.  Google is now penalizing sites that flagrantly buy text links, yet the demand for those links continues to grow.  This is because in spite of clear messaging that paid links are black hat and not welcome, Google is unable to detect a paid link from a naturally occurring one.  This leads to all kinds of ethical issues when penalties are involved.

We'll be discussing this and many other issues here, so stay tuned, a lot more is coming, including ways for you to join the conversation.