Penalty levels

[enchant]

I have about 50 websites that I've designed for customers. Most of them do well enough in Google, but two or three of them don't come up at all. If I enter the name of the company, as well as a few prominent keywords from the site, the result at the top of the list is my portfolio page where I mention them, but no listing of his site.

From what I've been reading, this sounds like he's been penalized for some reason. I can't imagine why. These are simple sites (5-10 pages) and the code is squeaky clean. I haven't knowingly broken any Google rules, but I'm not a SEO, so who knows?

In this forum, I see people mention specific penalties - a -50 vs. a -20 or -3, or a 950 penalty. This sounds to me like they've been able to determine exactly how they've been penalized. And although I've looked around, I can't find any explanation of how to determine this. If I believe a site has been penalized, how do I figure out what the penalty is?

Thanks for any help.
It seems to me that if I did something bad enough to justify a penalty, the powers that be at Google would want me to stop doing it, and there should be a way for me to determine my crime.

[tedster]

You'll notice that many of the "names" for penalties only describe how many positions the rankings have fallen - and a fall in ranking is not even a guarantee that there is really is a true penalty in place. It certainly doesn't offer a "cause-effect" conclusion in a lot of cases.

So don't be too much in awe of all those penalty "names". They're often just a kind of shorthand so we can have a discussion. You should check into the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. It contains quite a few good threads about understanding penalties and other ranking problems.

About the client sites you designed that are not ranking, I'd suggest a few basic checks to start:

1. Do they have at least a few backlinks from other websites in addition to your portfolio listing? If not, that may be all they need.

2. Are their pages actually indexed at all? For the domain name example.com, just do a Google query for site:example.com to see what urls are in the index. If there are none, there may well be technical errors that block crawling and indexing. It may not be anything you did - it could be a hosting issue of some kind, for instance.

3. Have these site set up a Google Webmaster Tools account? If not, they really should. If they have alreaady verified their ownership to Google, then they can look at the crawling/indexing data and other webmaster feedback that Google offers.

[enchant]

Tedster, thanks for the info! I really thought that "-30" was a specific level of penalty that Google administered. Now it makes sense.

To answer your questions:
1: Possibly not. I knew that mattered but didn't realize to that degree. I'll work on that.

2: Hmm... on one of them, Google gave me no results. I'll have to look into that!

3: I was actually unaware of that till now, but I'm on it.

Thanks again!