Few days ago, David Airey‘s logo design blog was penalized by Google and suddenly his rankings dropped on Google for various search terms. He didn’t know what happened and why he was penalized. But, he knew what to do and how to reverse the penalty. Today, he reports that the penalty on his blog has been lifted. He explains in great detail what he did and how he got it reversed. So, i’m not going to go deep into that. Till this time, i was not taking Google Penalties seriously. But, after this Airey incident, i have learned a lot of things. I did a search on the topic and found many useful informations to avoid Penalties. Here’s how it affected his traffic :

Firstly, read the Google Webmaster Guidelines thoroughly. It clearly explains what to do and what not to do.

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Always use rel=”nofollow” on all the paid links that you have on your website. Or you can redirect the link to an intermediate page that is blocked to the Search Engines by a robots.txt file. Incoming links are not a problem at all for Google. Because, the webmasters have no control over it. But, clearly the webmasters are responsible for the outgoing link. Linking to bad websites (bad neighborhood) can get you a potential ban. Here is a tool to check if you linking to “bad neighborhoods”. Here is an interesting question about linking to bad sites. John Chow has been severely penalized by Google for overdoing the “review for a linkback”. Not only he doesn’t rank on the first page on Google for “John Chow“, but also for “johnchow“.

After know about all these, i’m sure that i’ll be following a lot of SEO Techniques very soon. What do you all feel ? Have you been penalized by Google ? Share you experience in the comments.