Matt Cutts made a ten-minute keynote speech, at the Web 2.0 conference, called “What Google Knows About Spam.” The video is available on Matt’s blog. It is an eye opening look into SEO and how Google hits spam .

Matt Cutts has worked for Google for 8 years. He wrote hundreds of articles on search engine placement and the dangers of spam. Most of the news has become ghost whispers, always repeated, principally ignored. Google uses 100 different elements to rank a page. Most webmasters focus on linking and ignore the rest.

Black hat SEO is nothing new. Keyword Spam is nothing new. Webmaster and black-hat SEO services have always used keywords with no relevance to the web page. These spam pages are easy to recognize. They use script-generated content, are full of spelling mistakes, and keyword phrases. Keyword text spam is blended with the background, invisible on browsers, but picked up by search engines.

Matt’s reminds webmasters that Google has a tool to help become relisted: google.com/webmasters/. Webmasters should all register their websites with this tool. If Google notices the website has been hacked, or the webmaster hired an unscrupulous SEO firm, then a notice is sent to the webmaster. This attacks the situation before the webmaster’s site is banned.

One of the most common complaints is that DIY webmasters who follow all the rules, and their website are still excluded from indexing and Google’s rank. Cutts warns people that the secret to success is to write for people, not search engines:

Cutts says, new material falls into the common-sense category. It’s all about your business. "If I’m a plumber in Iowa, I may want to write about some of the strange things that happen to me on the job, or the five most common ways to fix a toilet," he says. "That kind of content can get really popular, and it’s a great way to get links." Folks will post your piece on one of the social media sites. And with links comes higher Google rankings. (source: USAToday)

Here are a few tips to avoid problems. Do not:

• build more than 50 links to a website in one week
• pay for links
• put paid links on your website
• stack keywords
• link to FAA/directories/link farms
• make sure no one clones your web-pages
• Use doorway pages
• Use font the same color as the background
• Stack web pages with typos
• Clone pages
• Post a lot of reviews unless you use <no follow> codes

These should help protect your website from being banned and penalized. If the website/blog is already penalized, then fix the above problems. Sign into your Google Account and look on the right side of the dashboard. There is a ‘reconsideration’ link. Complete it, and then hopefully, Google will re-index the website and return the web site’s page rank.