Type of Google Penalties
What you can expect to have happen to your website(s) if you are caught breaking Googles Webmaster Guidelines.
Typically, most webmasters find out the hard way that their web site is no longer ranking high (or appearing) in the SERPs. Matt Cutts posted some information about how they notify webmaster of Google penalties which is a postive step towards correcting the problem.
What is the difference between a ban and a penalty?
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A ban results in complete and total removal of your entire site from Google's search index, and is generally reserved only for major spam infractions (like using bots to spam guestbooks for the purpose of acquiring inbound links).
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A penalty causes your pages to drop in rankings, but if you search for some specific text from those pages you still find them in the index. This is reserved for less serious types of spamming (such as linking too many of your own sites together or packing a bit too many keywords in your image alt text).
If you’ve been hit with a penalty, correct the problems, then submit a reconsideration request.
These are the known types of Google Penalties:
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-6 Ranking Penalty — This newest Google penalty hit webmasters in #1 positions with no warnings whatsoever. Google had said it was a mistake and quickly fixed it. But the general theory is that the penalty came about due to stagnant linking or over-optimization.
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-30 Suppression Penalty: This penalty seems to hit web sites that focus on AdWords and have very little content. These are typically web sites that participate in guestbook spamming, use JavaScript redirects (instead of a 301 Redirect), or use doorway pages. Web pages with links that have redundant anchor text keywords seem to also fall to the #30+ ranking position.
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–50 Paid Links Penalty: Google wants to see a rel=nofollow tag on that link so that it doesn't pass PageRank. Those who attempt to buy their way into the upper rankings via Link Farms, Directory Lists and such found their web site(s) were hit with a -50 penalty.
These penalties seemed to been a major disruption to thousands of web sites during the last quarter of 2007. This type of penalty could also be triggered by suspicious link exchanges and participation in various link schemes as defined in the Google Webmasters Guidelines. -
PageRank Penalty: This first appeared in October 2007. Google sent out this wave of penalties that targeted web sites selling links and sponsored blog posts which passed page rank on to advertisers. Large web sites saw their PageRank number drop drastically. This Google Penalty affected nearly everyone on the Internet. Which is somewhat ironic because PageRank have very little to do with calculations in search results.
Quote: "This is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is but one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked." -
Google -950 Penalty: The most severe of all known Google penalties. Some think that this penalty is the "last straw" and Google will just remove your web site from their index if you don't get your act together and play by their rules. This penalty seems to be applied to a specific pages on a site and not to the entire web site.
The current theory with the -950 Penalty is that it has to do with either affiliate linking, content and search relevance, or aggressive link building to a specific page. This penalty is basically the kiss of death as it would take many many months to undo the damage even if you were able to make your web site squeaky clean again for Google.
* Source: Information collected and reviewed at Google Webmaster Central, Search Engine News, Search Engine Watch and many other SEO web sites and individuals which I interact with.
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