Google Penalties?

venal and mortal seo sins

[royalelephant]

I've been sifting through a lot of messages and haven't been able to find it. Can we start a list of Google penalties here: a list of venal and mortal seo sins.

[lazerzubb]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I think the problem is that you can't say for sure if it's a penality or caused by something else.

Only Google knows that, there is a few things which you should stay away from if you don't want to risk a penalization, they are mentioned on the Google Webmaster pages (at google.com)

[hanewich]

Here is a thread from the past that might give you some information:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[royalelephant]

hmmm... i woulda thought there was a check list of do's and don't's lurking somewhere that would be a good starting place for something insightful...

[nancyb]

hi royalelephant and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

As lazerzubb said, no one but Google knows for sure what the penalties are and these may be different dependent on the circumstances.

The thread hanewich offered is a good one for sleuthing out the possibilities. Look to see if you've employed any of those on your site, look to see if you've employed two or more of them, then use the site search [searchengineworld.com] to read past threads about penalties. Try searching on PR0, google +penalty, duplicate (or mirror domains), read some of the "Google Update" threads.

After you read some of these threads you will see that many people have differing opinions so a check list might be misleading to some and "right on" for others.

[royalelephant]

thanks nancy and everyone who helped... i've been wandering the web and in and out of WW for a long time, but I don't post as much as I ought to... I gather then that the considered opinion is that we only know how google works by watching what goes in and then what comes out... how very 19th century

[jomaxx]

Google will never offer specific details of what is and is not considered spam.

As soon as they do that, they are vulnerable to the inevitable lawsuits demanding that various sites be unpenalized/penalized because they did/did not conform to Google's stated guidelines.

[bluecorr]

Not to mention the fact that once people know exactly what Google considers to be spam or not, they'll find a way to go around it and have better knowledge (and chances) on how get away with it.

[pageoneresults]

royalelephant, you might want to begin at the source and then work your way through some of the links posted above.

Google Webmaster Guidelines [google.com]

[Yidaki]

Why build a list - there's allready one:

- Start with google's general information for webmasters [google.com].
- Then read about the google guidelines [google.com].
- Also good to learn about penalties is reading google's seo info page [google.com].

I guess a list of possible penalties isn't necessary. Just allways think worst case - your site will get booted and kicked out of google if you don't follow their guidelines. It's just that simple to stay safe.

<added>what ... i typed 7 minutes!? phhh... </added>