Penalties and bans

[I, Brian]

There's a lot of talk in general SEO forums about avoiding "blackhat" techniques because of the risk of being "banned" from search engine indices.

However, how common is it for a site to be banned outright from any index, as opposed to being penalised in some way?

And what forms of penalty are actually applied? I'm under the impression that Google can block the transfer for PageRank, for example, and possibly even devalue anchor text from specific links. But what other options are there?

As someone who hasn't knowlingly any experience with having domains penalised or banned, I'm curious what the actual realities of the situation are.

How dangerous are possible "flags", let alone "big red ones"?

[Nick W]

Not many Brian. Most of it's all BS

Silly marketing tactics to scare the kiddies into behaving. Most stuff G does seems pretty reversable to me (if you know your stuff)

But that's not the point, 80% of the "I've been banned" posts are just newbies getting their knickers in a twist about sandbox or the usual "hide and seek" malarky that goes on with new sites, backlinks and serps.

It's all bollocks for the most part.

Nick

[rustybrick]

Just try not to flaunt your success at the forums for Google to read. :)

[Nick W]

hehe, not me guv.

Never had a site banned, never done anything worthy of getting one banned. Wouldnt be stupid enough to post a url on a forum unless it was so white it would snow blind you :)

Nick

[I, Brian]

I was intrigued by comments by Daniel Dullitz in Mike Grehan's interview:


Mike - you cannot get banned from Google for life... But yes, you know particularly, and these are extreme cases... Yes, bad spammers could be removed from the index. But that happens so rarely. I mean, very rarely...

You know, I could count up the number of people who say they've been banned from Google... Well, it's a lot more than I know that really have been banned from Google. So, I think there are some people who are just too worried about the ban thing. You know, if you're just trying to provide good content to your own users, you should simply not be worried about a ban.