Site Penalties are aspects of your site that break search engine rules. If you have any penalties on your website, it will be much harder, if not impossible for your site to rank well. If you discover any penalties against your site, you'll want to take care of these as quickly as you can.

Penalties against your website can include:

• Over optimization
• Black Hat SEO
• Duplicate Content
• Too many paid links
• Keyword Stuffing
• Doorway Pages
• Invisible Text
• Link farms

Several of these penalties have come into existence from website owners and SEOs trying to find loopholes in the search engine algorithm or trying to exploit the measures in which certain factors are weighed. Specifically, tactics such as "keyword stuffing," in the keywords section of the meta information or even in other areas such as the meta title or description.

Another Black Hat tactic is placing non-nonsensical keyword-rich copy in a super small sized point on a website is the same color as the background. This is a real "No, No" and you can get slapped with a penalty really fast, especially in a competitive industry.

Website Penalty Case Study : BMW vs Google
A famous case of Google penalizing a website, although they don't just go after the big companies, came when BMW used keyword-laded doorway pages on their site.

Many of these on-page penalties may not only break the search engine's rules, but make for a bad user experience, which is one of the reasons they are rules in the first place. Search engines want to serve the user first and if they show irrelevant pages which have been overly optimized using copy written strictly for search engines, a reader may leave quickly and trust the search engine less.

Learn what penalties your website may have stopping you from doing well in the search engines, how to quickly spot them, and what to do if you have been BANNED by Google. Back to free website audit sign up page.