General Search Ranking Penalties

There is not much clarity regarding penalties and, as I have mentioned before, the very term itself is applied loosely and inaccurately time and time again. I have taken a few moments to put together a list of common search penalties and their diagnosis / prognosis / and treatments. Time estimates in the prognosis are based on our previous efforts – each penalty removal is different. Sitewide Ban: Diagnosis: Sitewide bans are the easiest to diagnose. You were in the index, now you aren’t. To determine this ban, check site:[yourdomain].com in G/Y/. If your site normally shows up for this query but no longer does, you have suffered a sitewide ban. Please make sure to determine the following though: 1, you are not employing a robots.txt or meta robots...