Ranking-penalties are one of the greatest SEO-mysteries. There are forum-threads about “punishments”, blogs refer to a “Google-ban”, and webmasters are certain that every new assessment of backlinks is a focused action against their own site. Seeing that apparently there is quite a lack of clarity in this matter and having answered a few emails on this topic in the past, I want to use this series to combine some helpful advice on this subject. Lets start with a summary of the different kinds of penalties:

PageRank-depreciation
Ever since Google started their “war against link-selling” in autumn of last year, most of the penalties that can be seen in the wild will belong in this category. Here a site that obviously sells links will have its PageRank lowered by a few points. While this is happening nearly on a daily base, I am still quite certain that these penalties are triggered manually. Right now there is no impact (yet) on the ranking of the affected site and it seems to me that the implementation of this penalty is still in its infancy.

Keyword-depreciation
This ranking-penalty only affects the position of the site for one or a small group of keywords. In most cases it is rather hard to identify this kind of penalty since it is often mistaken for the “Google-Everflux”, meaning the continual change in the Google-SERPs. Another difficulty is the fact that with this penalty there can be either a manual triggering or an automatic intervention from a machine through a so called “filter”.

Site-depreciation
Similar to the keyword-depreciation – except that it is not for lone keywords but for all terms that formerly ranked for the site. The site will be depreciated by a few ranks depending on the gravity of the offense and a restoration of the former position can be very complicated and lengthy depending on the circumstances.

Delisting
Google's strongest weapon – the whole site is deleted from the Googleindex and the chances are very slim to get it back with similar content or the same site-operators. To acquire the delight of delisting all you have to do is a massive and continuous transgression of Google's guidelines. For Google to take this one step further and evict all domains for an IP or IP-range from the index has happened in the past but then only very rarely and with justification.

The next part of this series will be about a scheme to realize if you walked into a trap and in case you did, which one it is.

Series: Google penalties – part I | Google penalties – part II | Google penalties – part III