Google finally admitted to the existence of the ‘-60 penalty.’ This is not news to anyone who saw Google destroy their link campaign efforts last September, or saw their search engine placement plummet January 12, 2008.

This penalty pushes a web page/web site down sixty places, to penalize what Google considers bad links. The problem is, Google changes the rules so often, even the SEO pros are left scrambling to figure out what Google wants.

The two most common reasons for being banned are duplicate content and using non-Google PPC programs.
A Google spokesperson noted: "Spam is an issue for all Internet users, and we work very hard to fight it. Using Google Docs, or any Google product, to host spam content is a violation of our product policies, and we actively disable such accounts."

Duplicate Content

One of the most frustrating penalties is the Duplicate Content Penalty. This does not refer to free-content-articles, or cross-posting. The problem arises when another webmaster copies large sections of a website, in effect, creating a duplicate or cloaked web site. This penalty is applied if there is a 301 hijack, leaving the webmaster totally oblivious to the problem.

It is a frustrating task, watching Google alerts, finding a spam page, then visiting Google sitemaps, finally reporting the spam. It helps prevent seeing your website penalized, but most of us would rather not deal with this frustration.

PayPerClick Programs

Many bloggers noticed they were banned. After conferencing with other bloggers and webmasters, they narrowed the problem to their Text-Link-Ads, Adbrite, and TLA. While this is a blatant ‘play my way or go home’ attitude on Google’s part, there is nothing webmasters can do except delete the ads.

Paid Links = Google Ban

Bigmouthmedia.com recently published a basic article, "Paid Links - can they come back to haunt you?" This topic is a hot one among ecommerce businesses, after all, isn’t PPC a paid link? Doesn’t Google give value to their advertisers? The answers are, yes.

Many SEO pros are using Google Docs to build the credibility of having Google’s name in their link. This is a perfect way for anyone who wants to thwart any ‘block URL’ filters or spam guards. Google wants to ensure that all inbound links are organic in nature.

Was Your Website Banned or Penalized?

The first step to overcoming a penalty is to verify the site through Google webmaster tools and then check the indexing tool. Is the site indexed? Did a large section of the website disappear? If the website is indexed, then it is probably just penalized. This can be fixed.

If the site is indexed, look for the reason it might have been banned. The good news is that many webmasters have successfully restored ‘most’ of their Page Rank since January 12. Problogger.com has somehow overcome the problem, but we’ve noticed that a lot of the links are gone from the home page. A personal count of the links on the home page revealed that they are even breaking the ’40 or less’ hyperlinks on a page. So, there is hope for the rest of us.

PayPerPost Ban

Do you sell links via services such as PayPerPost? If so, give up. There is little chance of regaining indexing and page rank. January 12, 2008 was D-day for PPP websites. Google has no intention of reversing their bans. The only option is to toss the URL into the re-sell directory, trash the content, and restart over from scratch.

There is some speculation that this is just another battle in the war against IZEA’s attempt to grab a large portion of the Page Rank industry. While the battle continues, the advertisers and bloggers suffer. However, with the rate of growth in the blog industry, no one can blame the search giant.

Blogging is growing at an incredibly active pace, with more than 175,000 new blogs appearing every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second, according to Technorati. PayPerPost, payu2blog, bloggitive, blogsvertise, reviewme, loudlaunch and a host of others are using paid-posts to build their own advertising empires. This devestated the purpose of Google’s page rank scheme.

Unofficial Google Banned Website Checker

Reconsider Submission Tool

One thing that has changed is that Google is offering a reconsideration submission option . Webmasters no longer need to fear being dumped forever. The hardest part is swallowing your pride, accepting the fact that Google does not care that you did nothing wrong. However, Google did back down a few weeks ago and changed the tone and wording on their form. Users no longer need to admit to violating Google’s guidelines

The estimated time to reinstate page rank is between two days and two months. *