Google Penalty Myths

One of the issues I discuss regularly with clients are elusive Google “penalties”. More often than not, good-willed webmasters and small business owners undertake SEO techniques that are not only frowned upon by Google, but easily detectable and and even easier to counteract. However, these techniques do not usually bring about “penalties”. Penalty: a punishment levied by a search engine, normally in response to techniques which violate the ToS, which leaves the punished site ranking below the point at which it would rank were those techniques simply countered and ignored. Is your site suffering a penalty? It is far too easy to attribute your site’s poor rankings to a penalty when, more often than not, another more straight-forward...