Has Google penalised or banned your site in the past or currently? These days, many businesses have a strong reliance on Google, and as such, a drop in rankings for whatever reason can be a cause of great stress. At times a drop in rankings may be caused simply by Google changing their algorithm, but it can also be due to a Google penalty.

So what do you do?

Well firstly, don’t panic. It is important to wait at least a few days to a week, to make sure that the cause of the drop is not due to an algorithm change. An algorithm change can make your site drop a few places, a few pages, or even drop from the rankings altogether. During this time:

• speak with your SEO expert as they should know of any recent changes within Google, and
• document any recent changes that have been made to your website to see if anything obvious has cause a Google penalty.

If nothing obvious has been the cause, and your site is still not appearing after a week, have your SEO expert conduct a thorough full site analysis to determine anything that has caused the penalty. If you are still not getting answers, or your SEO expert is not able to help, call us today for a full analysis of your website. We specialise in search engine services, and keep up-to-date on the right techniques to help keep you at the top of Google.

You may also be interested in this video below:

‘How Google Penalties Can Help Your Site’.

Author Note: During the interview, it is mentioned that ‘link building can never hurt’. We disagree with this, and you should consult with an SEO expert before you commit to any link building within this time.

Doorway Pages (or Landing Pages which is newer terminology for Doorway Pages) do not help rankings over a long period of time, and can lead to your site being penalised.

Doorway Pages were an old method used to create a particular page heavily optimised with certain key words/phrases. These pages were the “doorway” into your website, which in many cases were invisible to the viewer of your website, but visible to the search engines. Once Google became a major player in the search engine market this methodology slowly started to phase out as the search engine community realised that Doorway Pages were not endorsed by the major search engines and could in fact lead to a website being severely penalised, or in some instances banned altogether from their listings.

Some SEO companies still use this method, which is why it is important that you find out what methodology your SEO will use to optimise your website. You may get fast results initially through operating this way, but if you are interested in long term success it is important to use ethical methods to achieve these results. If a website is optimised properly then there is no need to use these types of tactics; it will simply mean that high rankings will take a little longer to achieve. The advantage of this is that those “ethical” rankings will be long lasting.

If in doubt about the methods a particular SEO is using, do some research to clarify whether these methods are ethical or not.

Below are some links to articles relating to unethical SEO methods that have had very negative effects to some businesses websites:

http://www.isedb.com/news/article/953

http://www.seoconsultants.com/traffic-power/clients

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff64783.htm