Hello

I'm new to this and trying to help a friend optimise his site. I think he has a penalty from Google he used to have had links in blue on a blue background (so I think this means hiddent text penalty?)

I remvoed them but want to check if there is a penalty, I suspect he used other tricks too. How can I find out?

Thank you

If your friend had hidden text on his page there is a possibilty that he might be penalized for it, but it's not automatic.

Has the page recently had a drop in PR?
Has the page recently had a drop in rankings that did not occur at the same time as an update?
If the page has many good links pointing at it, but the PR is zero, then its possible that there may be a penalty.

But, most of the suspected penalties I see are really pages which are just not relevant enough to rank well.

A really good way to check if something went wrong within Google is to do a search with your own domain name ("AS LONG AS ITS NOT A COMP KEYWORD")

So for example if your domain name is:

www.thisismydomain.com

Then do a search with: thisismydomain

If you get more then 100 and less then 250 results back from Google then your website whould be in the #1 position. If it's not then something is wrong.

Another good way is to take some text from your home page something that your site only has and that is atleast 5 to 10 words long and do a search with it. Your site should be on the first page of 10 results.

My 2 cents.

I'm not certain there is a way to accurately determine if you're under a penalty or not. You can suspect a penalty if a search on google fir site:www.yourdomain.com has no results at all, and you have previously been indexed. If it has results from other domains, you might be suffering from pagejacking.

You can email webmaster@google.com with the subject line 'reinclusion request' and supply the URL of your site. Of late, Google has been sending out a revised form response to this that includes some simple ways to tell if your site is indexed, but nothing much different than before.

In general, they used to tell you if your site was within guidelines or outside of them without engaging in specifics. But, that kind of feedback has become spotty at best in the past 6-12 mos. and mostly your communications are ignored in my recent experience.

If you ranked well on keywords with any competition and you used hidden text, and are now not ranking, it is entirely possible that someone told on you via a google spam report. This is quite common in many sectors not just the hyper-competitive ones. Hidden text is the easiest thing for other webmasters to find, and Google is somewhat active at removing sites based on spam reports--it seems sometimes much more than others.

There are many, many, many things that can knock you out of the index, including lots of things you don't have much control over. Communicating with Google and paying attention to their Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html) is just the first step, but expect to spend a lot of time in forums like this one, to find more info on the problem.