how not to get penalized is more important than how to do seo

Hi, you would'nt of got a penalty for adding 100 links in 2 weeks, thats nothing. you have just dropped in rankings i think. as for having 7 articles on your site thats more than enough content. sounds like your doing the google dance. Expect a jump in the next couple of weeks

well, domain name was registered in 2009, so it's not sandbox.

when I search domainname.tld ,it's still showing first one, when I do site:domainname.tld, it's still here. but when I search domainname, it's on end of page 5 ( total 5 pages show up), so I think it's a filter penalty from google.

7 articles isn't thin content. I have many #1 spots with just 3 articles.

What can matter however is how 'GOOD' those articles are. How unique are they? Were they rewritten from a single source? Will Copyscape say an article is unique even if you have replaced 5 words in a 10 word sentence?

I attended this webinar by Leslie Rohde the other day and he said Panda would penalize a site if it had common snippets of text within or with another site. And we have no control over these snippets because Google picks them randomly. A lot of people are going to disagree with me, but when it comes out of the mouths of people like Leslie Rohde, I don't argue. All the more reason why all the different pages should have different titles and different meta description tags.

I'm not saying this is what happened with your site because Panda would basically send it to the last page, not a -50 penalty! BTW, have you checked the last page of results as well for different keywords? Most likely this is just the regular Google dance.

SERPs are not static! :rolleyes:

You really should learn how search engines work, before moving forward.

BTW, that is not a penalty.

Do you think the thousands of web pages you don't own that were below you were all penalized because your the new guy in town ranking #3 for the same keyword? :rolleyes:

[silly ideas]

very, very unlikely. I guess you had a manual evaluation and a downranking...or its natural serps movement.

Probably true. But it's also much much easier.

As long as you use common sense and follow google terms, you won't get a penalty. Once you do something dodgy, be prepared to be found out...

Good white hat SEO is difficult!

Google penalized one of my pages once when I did a NOINDEX on the page!

%$#* you GOOGLE!

Impossible, can't be done =

building manual links too fast. A site that is 1 month old suddenly gets 5,000 forum profile links; 5,000 spun blog post content links from various networks, ALN, Articles Ranks, AMA, UAW; 10,000 blog comments, (all of which can be bought here from the many services offered)

That can easily trigger a penalty, one of the most common of which is the -50, I have seen it happen, though I have to say my linking efforts were much more conservative than what I have named above, though many noobs don't know, they follow the hype and get those links on steroids.

Again, those same links above all using the same exact anchor and linking only to the home page.

Unnatural, is all that i described above, when people link out naturally they do not use the same anchor 15,000 times, right? Natural link profiles are diverse in not only target url's but anchor's as well. A new site will usually not get 20,000 perfect backlinks with perfect anchors at 2 months of age. It could happen, I guess, with something really great, but perfect anchors?

The scheme where people "sponsor" wordpress themes and get a footer link, this penalty was confirmed by Matt Cutts in Google Webmaster Forums, where a webmaster couldn't understand why his site was sent to heck, and Matt Cutts responded, wish I had the link.

These are just a few examples, but there are many more.

I have a few sites that rank 100% on their own authority and freely give links, NO manual link building was ever done, pages became popular and were linked to, and I have others that are all manual, the difference in results is tremendous, and in my experience Google is very good at detecting the difference in extreme situations.

If you sell links and Google detects it your page rank is dropped to 0, can last for years, unless you remove all links and beg them in reconsideration.
No matter what sites they rank for sell and buy links, this is something they have made clear over and over, John Chow, PR5 to PR0, one of my sites, PR3 to PR0 for 2 years because there was one link in over 500 pages that had an anchor that was irrelevant to the entire site, this is the number one way they notice sold/bought links, irrelevance.

These are just a few examples, I think maybe that you were smart or educated enough in SEO and have not used these types of bad link strategies, but others have and have experienced real penalties.

When a site is firmly planted Page 5 for ALL pages of the site, and TLD without .com and WILL NOT MOVE for 2 years no matter what you do and hundreds of others experience the same, this is a penalty.

Webmaster World, has hundreds of pages dedicated to various Google penalties and hundreds of webmasters sharing the exact same scenarios, like the -50, -950 and such.

By the way, since I have stopped using the link schemes, and being much more careful (after learning the proper SEO techniques) I have not experienced any issues with penalties, SERP movements yes, but not penalties, the two are usually easy to decipher.

I have tested for the sake of testing a 9-page brand new EMD site with stop word '-'.

I blasted all the 9 pages with blog network (UAW, ALN, Kaboom, you name it) spun articles, SEONukeX, article directories, .edu profiles as if there is no tomorrow

The site is currently ranking between 3-5 for sometime now. Strange. No penalty. Nada.

The only thing I could see on the site is that it's a highly specialized niche with a lot of resource like sounds and diagrams about the niche.

I love the "noobs hooked on dreams". I often wonder if I am one when I start feeling warm and gooey with the spiels of the super salesmen

Adding to this...

I hope you didn't send all of those links to the index page, did you?

In addition to variation of anchor text, deep links to internal pages are natural and important. Also related to that is the relationship between link velocity and site growth - add new content as you add new links and link to all pages with a variety of different anchors (provided they are relevant to that page of course).

Post Panda, this seems to be much more effective than overusing your target term in the anchor text.

One more tip - 500 words of content is not enough anymore, think 1500+

I have sites which have been given a Google -40/-50 Penalty. Only trouble is they are backlinked by the ALN network and you cant remove the links. I know that the penalty will naturally expire but could take 3 months upto 2 years in extreme cases. Im just going to wait it out and put up other sites.

Incorrect.

Since my thread a while back about the site wide links scenario I submitted 4 reinclusion requests for one of those sites after tackling what I thought was on page issues.

As a result I have been in an email conversation with Google over the past 2 months.

Within the emails G not only told me that yes I have a manual penalty, but they have also referred me to a number of backlinks within my site's backlinks profile (not the sitewides, they were long gone) and they've told me that I have to make a substantial effort to have the links removed before the penalty will be lifted.

This is FACT. I have it in black and white within my gmail account, straight from the horses mouth. G does manually penalise sites and it does penalise sites for backlinks.

It's not how fast or wether the links are high or low quality, it's UNATURAL looking links.

Incorrect. If you've been flagged for a manual review, 100 backlinks can cause a penalty if they look unatural and make up the majority of your backlink profile.

What really confuses me is that whenever these penalty debates pop up, it's always those who say they have never had a penalty that claim to be the experts about Google penalties ?? Doesn't that seem a little strange?

Ive been told you cannot remove links from the ALN Network ?? So what position does that leave me in ? Build better links and hope Google notices ?

Site is dancing between pages 5 and 7 so I guess it could be a -50 penalty.

You have a partial point Yukon, triggering a filter or being flagged for a manual review SOLEY due to backlink building will require a substantial amount of link building and probably more than is achievable without automated software.

But you miss my point and you overlook one essential fact - excessive link building is not the only thing that will flag a site for a manual review. Google are reviewing sites for a number of reasons these days and one of them is simply because you are on page 1 for a given keyword (selection process unknown).

Now, if you are reviewed and you have an unatural link profile, you risk a penalty. This is regardless of the total amount of backlinks you have and how quickly you have built them.

I also think you need to start giving the Google reviewers the credit they deserve, unatural doesn't simply mean same anchor text, they are a bit more clued up than that.

I agree, people should pay more attention to the SEO strategies of others that don't get penalized. But I'd be more inclined to believe those that have experienced penalties when debating the reasons for a penalty.

I talk from penalty experience, confirmed by the big G themselves, you base your assumptions on the fact you have never been penalised!?

I've never been bitten by a shark but I sure as hell know they bite ...

would i be wrong to say that hiring just about any warrior for hire will result in an unnatural link profile?

Well this is a tough one to pinpoint the exact problem as to why your pages were bumped back in the SERPS. Yeah most people are clueless when it comes to white hat SEO (which is what you should strive to create) and all the other stuff you hear about from so-called gurus. The adding the 100 links in 2 weeks wouldn't necessarily get you penalized by google....unless there is some shady thing happening...like 75 links added in 1 day..hhm?

But yeah I agree with some of the posts...in that the SERPS are not static and will change based on what keywords you're trying to rank for.

It would be beneficial to you to head over to google and read all their forums on SEO and what they like and don't like. But essentially google is trying to rid itself of bs websites with crap content and bogus black hat stuff. If you just build your sites with original content over time and get links over time....plan on 2 months initially....and then check your stats via analytics and see what traffic is happening on your site...you should never get penalized.