Internet Marketing for the massesTechnology blog about internet marketing and tech related news.

Google: Large dominant search engine with ubiquitous nature on the web, that eveyone apparently loves but is fearful of -if your income depends on Google BE CAREFUL. This article is about Google penalties, and YOUR site and how it functions within it. Well first of all it is necessary to say no one wants to be at the back of the search engine, but what you must know is often quite vague to get to the position of dominance. Google is the master of vagueness you see, and is known for moving the goal posts and double standards. Anyway enough of the bashing, lets look at what red cards Gevil can hand out. Some of these are probably automated though.

1. Duplicate Content

This is somewhat self explanatory, if your site has copied a lot of content from other sites Google can penalise you. This could be a problem in entertainment sites, or even blogs, the problem is I am not sure how Google knows who is the originator - maybe cache date? Using scraper technology for example would bring a lot of dupe content and set off Googles numerous spam filters.

2. Selling Links on YOUR site

This has infuriated a log of blog owners, and Google has been quick to hand out ’slaps’ to various large scale internet entrepreneurs, probably because the greedy bastards want to dominate the advertising market. You’re supposed to put “no follow” or something on the outbound link so you can do the job of Google’s failed PR formula - at least that is what I think.

3. Linking to bad neighbourhoods

This is another odd penalty, but if you linked to some dodgy site you could in fact get banned or something. Not knowing which sites Google thinks are bad is a problem however…

4. Cross Linking

Could get you penalised if you own a bunch of sites and link to each site, although I see this a lot HP do it, and others I am not sure what the problem is if it’s your site you should be able to link to another of your sites if you own that property.

5. Too many links at once

Most Internet marketers look to buy links on some sorts, large companies do it, small companies do it, and one man bands do it. The problem is if Google catches you, or if one of their geeks manually reviews your site. I can point to at least 50 sites now both small and large that buy links and are all on the front page for competitive key terms. Getting ‘caught’ is the debate which is most confusing. Can Google bots spot bought links, can its algorithm?

6. Blog comment spam

Another possible ban or penalty if you go around and post comments on blogs linking to your site. Again I see tons of sites that have this and have both a good PR and serp results.

7. Crap links

If all your links come from crap sites that aren’t on topic. This is debatable.

8. Paid Reviews

If you sell reviews a la John Chow, this can also get you wacked, demoted, removed, penalised etc. Apparently displaying PayPerPost logos or badges can suffer similar effects.

9. Duplicate meta descriptions

This has possibly been updated, as I checked in Google Webmasters Tools and it warned that the number of dupe content it found can have a negative effect.

10. Doorway pages, misleading subdomains, linkfarms and general naughtiness.

There are tons of sites with the above, doorway pages are pages sites that spam you by stuffing the page with crap in order to get you on their site and then send you somewhere else most of the time.

Subdomain spam can be similar in that for example I can put “dirty women nude” infront of the URL in the form of a subdomain to attract people and then serve them something else - bait and switch I guess.

Linkfarms are pages stuffed with fricking links, with no other purpose other than to pass on link juice to a site. Some directories I guess are like this.

What do penalities mean?

Penalities can mean a number of things

• Page Rank dropped - from 4 to 2 or zero
• Dumped at the back of the search results
• Dumped out altogether
• dropped back a number of days or places -50, -90, -950 have all be known
• You don’t rank for your keywords no more
• Manual penalities - some peeveed Google geek takes his frustration out on your site - who knows what happens here!

If you get penalised you might not know why or how. This is a problem, in Webmaster tools ( does fucking Google think everyone is a webmaster?) it will highlight certain things, but if you get penalised it won’t tell you.

You can file reconsideration requests, but they probably hardly look at them. Penalities could either be automatic -filters, or manual.

I would advise not using ANY Google tool - Webmaster, Analytics, if you partake in any of the above.