How to avoid being penalized

This part is simple, you can avoid being penalized by the search engines by simply practicing good old fashioned “White Hat” SEO techniques. Build good pages with useful content and you will be rewarded, use the “Black Hat” SEO techniques and you may experience good results, but it will be short lived.

If you are going to dabble in some of the black arts of the SEO world, at least try to keep in minimal and not obvious, remember to not only consider the human visitors, but the spiders as well.

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How to recover from a penalty

If you have found yourself penalized, don’t panic. First find if you have surely been handed a penalty. Do a search for your site name, and also a site search to see if you have been totally removed.

Second, narrow down the reasons for which you may have been penalized:

·  Have you added a new link recently? – Make sure you are not linking to a “bad neighborhood” or that one of your link partners has not changed their site’s topic that may be considered bad.

·  Have you added a new page? – Check to make sure you have not added a page which might have offended the spider, either with keyword spamming or duplicate content.

·  Have you changed your directory structure? – Changing the naming structure of your site without adding redirects to the old pages will have an almost instant response from the search engine. Always make sure to add a redirect for any pages that you are going to rename or move.

·  Is the spider able to access your site? – Run a DNS trace route to determine if your site is visible to the entire internet. Also make sure that your robots.txt file is up-to-date and is not disallowing the spiders visit to either your entire site or certain directories.

If you have found any one of these to be true, rectify the problem as quickly as possible and wait to see if the spider returns and your site re-appears in the index. If after 4-6 weeks your site has still not returned to the index, notify the search engine operator to inquire the status and if there are further problems that need to be corrected.