SEO Penalties

While performing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on your website, you may notice a sudden sharp decline in visitors from a particular search engine. This can happen for any number of reasons, but the number one suspect is usually a search engine penalty has been applied to your site.

Types of Search Engine Penalties

• Duplicate Content – The search engine algorithm will filter out what it considers to be duplicate content. This can happen if a certain number of words or phrases exceed a pre-determined level as specified by the algorithm. The filter works by dropping either the newest content, or replacing the older content if the page has been determined to have more “weight”.
• Keyword Spam – If a page is found to have been created solely for the purpose of drawing visitors with keywords not related to the topic of the page, the page in question would be dropped from the index. This is usually applied manually by a human reviewer, but can be automatically applied if the spider detects it.

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• Cross Linking / Interlinking – This involves link schemes set up between sites that are closely related, links are created solely for the purpose of increasing link popularity. These schemes are detected usually because the sites reside on the same group of servers which contain similar IP addresses.
• Cloaking / Masking – Pages created specifically for spiders containing keywords or phrases, human visitors are redirected to a totally different page containing different content than what the search engine spider sees. These are usually caught by human reviewers after a complaint, or if a sophisticated search engine spider is smart enough to catch on.
• Sandbox – The sandbox is a sort of incubator, new sites or pages might be added to the sandbox to give them time to develop to ensure that the pages will be around long enough to warrant a place in the index. This penalty, if you can call it that is hotly a debated topic however as nobody has been able to positively confirm that it exists.