When does Google ban, penalize or sandbox a website?

Someone said, “You’re not a true SEO until you’ve been banned at least once!” Of course, I do not intend to say that every SEO guy should get banned. I know it sucks. But sometimes it helps to understand the finer lines when your site is banned.

Search engine penalties and banning are not the topics that are discussed frequently by webmasters, except those who are proud to call themselves blackhat. But many times, I have seen people getting confused with low SERP rankings and banning. Just because your site is not ranking in Google for a certain keyword(s), which was a traffic puller earlier, does not necessarily mean that your site has been banned.

Remember, Google is CRAZY! It is extremely choosy about the quality (and quantity) of your links. You can try an exercise to believe this. Try searching for your backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer and the link:http://sitename.com command in Google. What do you see? I am sure you got my point now.

Sometimes, it is very difficult to determine, whether a site has been banned, penalized or sandboxed (in case of Google). Let’s see them in detail.

When does Google ban a site?

1. You don’t follow their guidelines.
2. You get involved in link farms.
3. Your site is screwed up. This happens when you neglect the code to content ratio and keep adding a number of scripts to your site.
4. You have a huge number of affiliate links / paid links on your site.

When does Google penalize a site?

1. You really mess with some of their serious guidelines.
2. You keep using the same anchor text for linking to a particular page.
3. The keyword density for certain keyword(s) remains on a higher end for all the pages of your website.

When does Google sandbox a site?

Though webmasters have different opinions about the existence of Google Sandbox Effect, but assuming that it exists, here are a few things why Google will sandbox a site.

1. You caught their attention due to your black/grey hat SEO techniques.
2. Your site is new but yet attracting huge number of inbound links.
3. The links to your site are from a bad neighborhood.

It is very important to know whether you have been banned, penalized or sandboxed by Google. If you are banned, you can opt for a reinclusion request or just move on and forget the site. If your site is being penalized, then you are being monitored by Google and every action of your’s either helps in rectifying the penalty or pushes you deeper into the banned zone. But if your site is sandboxed, then the best option for you is to keep your site in good shape. Be careful with the content of your site and avoid any black/grey SEO techniques. Within a short span of time, your site will be out of the sandbox if you keep it clean.

Conclusion: Don’t jump to conclusions by merely touching waters from the surface. Go deeper and find the root cause and work towards it. This will not only focus your efforts in the right direction but will also help in giving your site a good credibility and ranking.

Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/