Search engines have rules for what’s acceptable—and not acceptable—for content, linking, and many other factors that are used to calculate relevance. Some guidelines are clear and public, but other policies are known only to the search engines themselves, and if you step over the line, your site may be dinged with a penalty that decreases your rankings or worse, eliminates your site from search results altogether.
Even though many of these policies are not public, observant search engine optimizers have recognized and described many tactics that can draw a penalty to web site. In today’s SearchDay article, Coping with Search Engine Penalties, guest writer Marcela De Vivo describes many of these gotchas, and offers advice and guidance for dealing with penalties.