There’s a lot of talk in the SEO industry about how easy it is to be penalised by the search engines. It’s true that it’s incredibly easy to put a foot wrong when it comes to the search engines, but the focus really is on the wrong thing. The penalty itself is usually easily fixed. It’s not the ultimate problem.

The main difficulty with search engine penalties, apart from the fact that they can set your search engine optimisation plan back by up to a year, is that they’re so tricky to detect. For a start, half of the things the SEO community describes as ‘penalties’ are far more subtle things. Your site might drop in the rankings due to things like filters, which tease out pages that may present a problem to the integrity of the search results. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been dropped from the index, or even that you need to do some repair work.

Fixing the problem when you do encounter a penalty is usually absurdly easy. Here are some of the solutions to some very common problems:

*Hidden text: Remove it.
*Bad links: Cut them off.
*Doorway pages: Take them off your site.
*Duplicate content: Create some fresh stuff.
*Spider traps: Fix them.
*Non-indexed pages: Place them closer to the home page.
*Keyword stuffing: Take out a few.

See? The solution to most of the problems faced by the average website is usually a case of removing the offending item. The part that more site owners should worry about is figuring out that they’re being penalised in the first place.

This can be a lot harder than you would think. Even if you obsessively watch your rankings, as many site owners do, there’s no real way to tell whether a dip is due to user fluctuation or due to a form of penalty. Due to the time lag between a change on a site’s page and the alteration in the site’s ranking, it’s hard to track down what could have caused the penalty.

Consulting a professional when you suspect you’ve been subject to a penalty can help. Even more helpful is staying in touch with your SEO firm after you’ve completed the search engine optimization process. You can talk to our experts at SEO Consult Australia about the pros and cons of ongoing SEO maintenance. Catching a problem early on can mean that you don’t have to wait for your traffic to recover.

Some of the things that site owners worry about aren’t even likely to be a problem. For example, bad links into your site are commonly said to be a potential source of trouble. Unless you’ve reciprocated the links, this is unlikely to be the problem with your site. However, if you discover that a spam site is featuring links to yours, it might be an indication that you’ve been hacked or some other nefarious scheme is at hand. Ferreting out the problem might take quite a bit of work, and it’s best to consult a professional.