I mentioned in my previous post, Canonicalizing Duplicate Content, that search engines really penalize websites or blogs. There were lots of websites and blogs that experienced penalty from search engine (especially from Google). John Chow’s blog is one of those penalized blogs.

Why do search engines penalize websites?

Just like what I said already on my previous articles, the goal of the search engines is to provide relevant result on every queries made by the internet users. Engineers behind the search engines wrote algorithms which are responsible in indexing websites and returning the list of webpages as the result in every searches made through the search engine.

From time to time, search engines became more popular. (Should I say, search engine is now the most popular tool in finding information from the internet.)

Webmasters (including bloggers) on the other hand realized how important is the search engine in getting traffic for their websites or blogs. Almost all internet users use search engine in searching for the information they’re looking for. And those webpages listed at the top of the list at the result page are those that are most likely visited by the internet users.

So, webmasters studied how the search engines rank webpages at the search engine result pages. After learning the secrets of these search engines, they then optimized their websites or blogs so that the webpages of their websites or blogs will be listed at the top at the search engine result pages.

Because of the competition in getting the higher rank at the search engine result pages, some webmasters or bloggers use tricks to win the top position of the SERP. This trick is called as the “Black Hat SEO“.

Black Hat SEO really embarrass the engineers behind the search engines because people practicing Black Hat SEO are gaming the algorithm of the search engines. So, to retain the high quality and relevancy of the search engine results, the algorithm of the search engine has been modified so that those who gamed it would be penalized and would never be included on the SERP, if not, the page rank weight of the webpages of their websites or blogs would be lessen.

So, to make it short, search engines penalize websites that violates the existing policies and guidelines imposed by the search engines.

What are the techniques that can cause the penalty?

Among the search engines that I knew (ie Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc), I think only the Google search engine is strictly penalizing websites.

For example: John Chow’s blog is under the penalty imposed by Google search engine but it’s not penalized in Yahoo search engine.

So, we’ll focus our discussion here on Google search engine.

According to Matt Cutts, one of the engineers of Google, any techniques that manipulates the PageRank and the page rank at the search engine result will lead to being penalized by the search engine.

These technique are:

1. Link Exchange.
2. Link Buying without “nofollow” tag.
3. Link Selling without “nofollow” tag.
4. Creating Fake Network of Blogs. Some webmasters create several blogs from the free blogging hosts like blogger.com, wordpress.com, blogsome.com, etc. Then all these blogs are linking to the real blog.
5. Keyword Stuffing. Flooding each webpages with keywords.
6. Linking to Bad websites.
7. Cloaking. Configuring the webpage so that the content seen by the search engine is different to what the users have seen.
8. Hidden Texts and Hidden Links in your blog’s webpages.

Is there a way to check if your blog has been penalized by Google?

Actually, only Google knows which websites were penalized in their system.

You, as the webmaster of your website,  can only tell that your website or blog has been penalized already by Google if you know that you’re doing some techniques enumerated above and then your blog or website experienced big changes in its PageRank, page rank or position at the SERP, or anything related to SERanking.

There are actually several kinds of penalty imposed by Google to those websites that found by Google’s algorithm guilty of manipulating the PR.

1. Your blog will receive lesser weights to inbound links. So, your blog would have the hard time getting the higher rank at the SERP.
2. Your blog is totally deindexed. Before if you’ll use the “site:example.com” search, you’ll find pages being indexed by Google. But now, the search returns nothing.
3. The drop of PageRank (PR). Before, your blog has a site PR of 5, but now, the PR is only 2.
4. Your blog doesn’t rank well for its own keyword. For example, my blog is “SELaplana”. If I’ll google “selaplana”, my blog is listed on the top of the SERP. Once it is penalized, this blog will never be found at SERP.
5. Your blog’s outbound link has no weight at all.

For me, it’s just fine if your blog will experience the 1st, 3rd and 5th mentioned penalty because at least your blog has still the chance to top the ranking at the SERP.

The real problem is when your blog will receive the 2nd and 4th penalty because it only means that your blog is already banned from the Google SERP.

So, how do you check if your blog is penalized by Google?

We can check your blog at the Google SERP in few ways:

1) “site:” search

Search Google using “site:example.com”. Replace “example.com” with your blog’s domain.

By doing this search, Google will return in the SERP the list of webpages of your blog that have been indexed by Google.

However, we couldn’t say that your blog was penalized by Google if your blog is new and you don’t know if it was already included in the SERP before.

2) PR checking

Check the PR of your blog if it drops. For example, the PR of this blog before is PR5, but now it’s only PR 2. So, my blog experience a drop of PR.

3) SEO Experiment

You have to do an experiment or an SEO campaign by following the steps below. But it will work only if your blog is not yet banned by the Google.

step 1: Think of the words in which if you google it Google will return nothing at its result page.

For example: My name is “Sustines Laplana“. Before if you’ll google my name the search engine will return no result. But now, if you google my name, the first webpage on the SERP is the About Page of this blog. (view screenshot)

So, why not use your name? But if you think you name is very common, so why not use the name of your father, mother or siblings? You can also invent any words. Just make sure that if you google that term the result returns nothing.

step 2: Write a short article about the term you picked from the step 1.

step 3: Establish a link from your blog’s sidebar to the article you wrote in the step 2 using the term you picked from the step 1.

For example: In step 1, I picked my name “Sustines Laplana”. Then in step 2, I wrote an article and published it here in my blog with the title “About Me”. And on this 3rd step, I put a link at the sidebar of my blog with the anchor text “Sustines Laplana” and it is linking to my article “About Me”.

step 4. After 1 month, google the term you used as the anchor text on the link you did in step 3. If your article is not included at the SERP, then there might be some penalty imposed against your blog.

Old Related Articles

This article is my answer to the request post at the comment section of my article, “Duplicate Contents and Canonicalization“.

And by the way, I wrote articles before that are related to this topic. These are:

1. Is My Blog Penalized by Google?
2. About Supplemental Index
3. Text Link Ads is Banned
4. Google Banned John Chow
5. PR is now useless

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