A picture of a brick wall with barred windows and the words "YOU in GoogleJail" - "How to get out on good behaviour"Search Engine Guide kindly republished my article called “How a Google Penalty Can Make Your Site Stronger” which prompted some great questions from readers which I have reformatted and posted here for readers of the StepForth Web Marketing Blog:

Question 1) My site has been penalized by google coz of paid post and links, which left my site with a PR 0, do you have any suggestions for that?”

Ross Dunn: Yes, the best way to go is to have all of the paid posts and links removed; if that has not happened already. Then once you are certain you are no longer infringing on Google’s guidelines, go into your Google Webmaster Tools account and submit a request for reconsideration of your website; if you can’t find the area to do that, then just do a quick search in the help area and you will find it.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee this will get you back into Google’s graces and there is also no telling how long Google will take to even get to your request, however, it is an excellent first step. The next step is to build your site into a powerhouse of excellent information by creating a blog or getting more active in the one you have. This involves posting original, high quality content that provides potential readers with something of value – be it simply an enjoyable read or useful tips. The act of building your site’s reputation through new quality content will help your odds of getting back into Google’s graces considerably.

Question 2) “I am eager to know if we go for URL removal request and make changes to site and then again submit link to google.Does it faster way to get out from penalization?”

Ross Dunn: No, although I can’t say I have tried such an option, my opinion is that removing your URL will not speed anything up because Google will retain the historical profile of the domain – including its transgressions.

Question 3) “What are other penalties that could still exist? Like content duplication, same meta tags for all pages, bad neighborhood, etc. If you have any resources that provides information on “Google Penalties” than it would be great to share with SEO community.”

Ross Dunn: Content duplication is not met with a penalty per se unless the site in question is 100% duplicate content at which point it might as well be penalized since Google will have little or no interest in it. There are a few exceptions to that such as news aggregate websites which are, by definition entirely duplicate-content-driven.

As for duplication of Metas and Titles… that is just going to harm you in terms of on-page optimization but it will not incur any sort of Google penalty unless, of course, the tags are full of SPAM but that should be a given to most novice SEOs.

Bad neighborhoods is an entirely different thing altogether because it really depends what you mean by that. If you have links predominantly from “bad neighborhoods” then it is quite possible Google will go beyond just negating the benefit of the links to actually penalizing your site because it will appear as though you are trying to game Google’s trust algorithms. If you mean being hosted on a server where you share the ip address with some bad neighborhoods… well that is a little more difficult to prove but I expect it can be a problem.

If you have any more questions please do not hesitate to contact me via our contact form or request a quote for some consulting to get your Google penalty turned around and your site back on the path to top search engine rankings.