In no way should the statements in this article be considered to beaffiliated with Google or official statements from them. But as far as I know, there are two types of obvious penalties: algorithm-based and manually-driven. Before we can start troubleshooting, you must understand these types of penalties. Algorithm-based penalties result from your website being “filtered” by Google’s algorithm due to some linking and onsite issues. Different types of filtering exist; the most common involve the duplicate content filters. Algorithm-based penalties could result from your site sending a poor relevance signal to search engines. It means that your site is not telling them that a certain page on your site is relevant to a certain query. Other algorithm-based penalties involve minor infractions in the areas of hidden text, cloaked text, nearly hidden text and … Read entire article »