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Have you noticed a sudden drop off in your search engine optimization results for your website? If you have, chances are you’ve incurred a small or large penalty either automatically or manually entered into Google’s search engine algorithm.

Google has unofficially acknowledged ratings ranging in scale from -6 to -950 positions in the search engine results. The -6 penalty means that a site ranking 1^st on Google’s search results will now rank 7^th. The -950 penalty will mean it finally shows up around page 95. What kind of SEO practices will earn your page a ranking penalty?

-6 Penalty

The -6 penalty is an automatic penalty for poor content and excessive keyword optimization. When Panda was put into place, many site owners, including major article marketing sites like EzineArticles, reported their site dropping by six places in the search results. This is an effort on Google’s part to encourage high quality, relevant content, not SEO-driven article marketing. Typically, you can reverse a -6 penalty fairly easy after adding better content and submitting a reconsideration request.

-30 Penalty

The -30 penalty is typically the result of affiliating or linking to Google’s blacklisted sites, spam sites, or doorway pages. It can also result from noncompliance with Google’s suggested guidelines for websites or by reciprocal link building with low-quality or low-traffic websites. It can be applied manually or automatically by Google’s algorithm.

-60 Penalty

The most common cause for the -60 penalty is poor linking practices, including hidden links and footer links. It’s been a common SEO practice to put a paragraph containing links to other pages on your site in your template’s footer. Google is trying to discourage this practice. Hidden links, or links that are the same color as your page background, are also subject to a -60 penalty. You can also get a -60 penalty if you are suspected of spreading malware, so be very careful with the JavaScript that you install on your site. A penalty of -60 is often applied manually to sites in direct violation of one or more of Google’s Webmaster guideline rules.

-950 Penalty

Typically, this is the final warning before being completely banned from the index. Sites that buy and sell links or PageRank will be hit with a -950 penalty. Google expects that this will destroy their business model of offering links from a high-ranking site, making link farms untenable. One old method of SEO might be particularly likely to garner -950 ratings for all of its pages: site networks. This practice involves building a number of similar, interlinking pages on different domains. If none of these sites have worthwhile content, probably anywhere under 3,000 words, they will probably get slapped with a -950 before they earn any real income for the marketer. If you’ve used a link network in the past for your unrelated sites, it’s time to remove it.

Final Thoughts

Above all, you should pay attention when you take a -6 penalty to ensure that your page never receives a -30 penalty. Clean up your links and use nofollow on anything that might be construed as excessive linking. Examine your templates carefully to ensure that they don’t use JavaScript containing malware. Make sure there are no hidden links on any of your pages. Start posting longer articles with fewer keywords during your article marketing efforts and make sure your site gets sufficient traffic before developing an aggressive link-building campaign.

This is part one of a two-part article. To read the second part of the article about how to get out of Google’s penalty box, click here.

Posted by Greg Henderson, an Internet Marketer and SEO Associate for an email search and free public records site: MFES & RecordsProject. Please feel free to leave a comment or e-mail him.

This is a unique article published on SEO Desk with exclusivity.

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