Beware of the Search Engine Penalty Box

There is a great article posted today at SearchEngineWatch.com by Marcela De Vivo that talks about Search Engine (SE) penalties. 

Everyone who has a website wants to be listed as high as possible in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for their selected keywords.  But some people go too far and try to artificially inflate their rankings by using dubious methods.  When this happens, SE will access penalties that can range from lowering ones ranking in the SERPs, to an outright ban from the SE.

In this article, Marcela talks about:

• A drop in the SERPs due to changes other than penalties
• What are considered real SE penalties
• What to do if you are put into the SE penalty box

This first part of the series talks about Google specifically.  In the next part, Marcela will talk about the search engine penalties applied by Yahoo and MSN.