How do web sites get penalized or banned?

There are many ways for a web site to get penalized or banned.  First of all if you see your web site disappear from the search engine rankings, check to see if it is still listed.  You can do this by typing in site:www.theinternetpresence.com into a search engine.  The search engine may have changed it's algorithm and your ranking may have just dropped.  If your site is not listed in the search results you can politely contact the search engine and explain the situation by telling them how you checked for your listing.  Ask them if and why your site got banned so that you can correct the situation for them.  Usually if you are nice about it they will re-index you.  Search engine people are not the ones to piss off!

Here are some example on how a web site can get penalized or banned:

Tiny Text - If your web site has abnormally small text on its screen the search engines view that as 'cheating the system' thinking that you are trying to stuff many keywords into the page that the average person could not read.

Color of text same as or close to the background color - If your text is hard to read because it blends into the background, the search engines will view this as an attempt to 'cheat the system' like tiny text.

Having too many links on the same page - The search engines get flagged when this happens to warn it to see if you are part of a linking farm or are trying to cheat the system by building a massive amount of reciprocal links.  This used to work in the old days when search engines put a value to a site by the number of links pointing to it.  But now it will penalize you if the links are not of relevant content.

Bad link that you point too - If you have a link that points to another web site that has been blacklisted for sending spam, been penalized, or dropped altogether your site will be blacklisted, penalized, and/or banned as well.  If you have a bad web site pointing to you that you do not point back too you won't be penalized.

Web address part of spam email - If you web site address was inside some spam email sent to everyone that will cause the search engines to penalize/ban your site.  Someone else may send out spam email with your web site address in it on purpose to discredit and know your rankings down.  This had happened to a top SEO company.  They contacted the search engines to find out why there ranking dropped, discovered how, and discovered who did it.  Now they are in a lawsuit against the people who blatantly did this to them.  So remember it is important to find out the cause!

Too many keyword phrases on your web site - If the density ratio of the keyword phrase on your web page is too high (used to many times) you can get penalized or banned for that.

Repeated keyword phrases - If you repeat your keyword phrase one right after the other you can get penalized or banned.  The content of your site has to flow and be readable to a human being otherwise it sends a red flag to the search engines.

Landing or Redirect pages - In the past people used to put up an index page optimized for each search engine.  Thus having numerous starting home pages to their site.  Search engines receive a red flag when it encounters that today.

Mirror Sites - If you have duplicate sites with duplicate content you may get penalized for that making the search engines think you are trying to cheat the system.

Multiple domain names pointing to your site - If the search engine detects many domain names pointing to the same web site it will ban or penalize a web site in the search engine rankings.  People used to do this with 150 or more domain names pointing to the same web site.  Having 2 or 3 domain names pointing to your site will not penalize you.

Multiple site connecting to each other - If  you have an excess number of web sites pointing to each other that ALL come from the same IP address, the search engines will view this as an attempt to make your web site appear popular.  This used to be done in the past with 150 or more sites in big corporations.

Every day someone tries to find a loophole or a way to cheat the system to achieve high web rankings, and everyday the search engine technicians detect that and change their algorithms to look out for that.  This is one of the major reasons why search engine algorithms change constantly.  And sometimes in the process it hurts the ranking of those who don't use these methods.

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