Avoid Ranking Penalties

In concert with our recent post on Black Hat SEO and the J.C. Penney debacle earlier this week, some web owners struggle with getting a rankings penalty lifted from their site. Google places penalties on websites for various offenses varying anywhere from Manual Penalties like off topic porn content or link purchasing (in the J.C. Penney example) to Algorithmic Penalties in form of classifiers for things like spam content, keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects and so on. The best way to not get a penalty is to steer clear of any of the above practices. But, if you do have a penalty placed on your site, the best solution is to change your site to fix the problem and after Google recrawls, you should pop back up. Matt Cutts, Google Spam Team leader discusses this subject in detail. Work with your SEO team to ensure your SEO strategy is white-hat in nature and will garner long-term visibility improvements.