Few things frighten a website owner more than the possibility of being assessed a penalty from Google. The reason for that fear is uncertainty. Not everyone is entirely certain what will invoke the wrath of the search engine giant. Because of that unknown factor, many legitimate and entirely honest webmasters often believe they have been subjected to a penalty, even when they are not. Part of the confusion over Google penalty policy is not knowing what will cause a penalty. Another area of concern is what exactly Google's various punishments involve and how they are applied. Knowing how to avoid penalties entirely by only using above board optimization techniques is the best policy for every legitimate website owner to utilize. Avoiding the many known penalty triggers will provide peace of mind and far better results in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Severe abuses of the Google search engine policies and terms of service can lead to outright banning of your website from the search engine giant. Because of that potentially devastating loss of revenue to your online business, it pays to use only the best search engine practices. The question then, is what is considered a penalty, and how can you avoid being handed one.
Determining whether a site has been penalized or not isn't too hard for an experienced SEO pro. The why is a bit harder - it's all based on conjecture about how Google works. In some cases, the site has no obvious nor hidden violations, and is guilty only by association. Those kinds of penalties take a long time to figure out. Getting a site out of a penalty can be a real bitch. In many cases, it's not really possible - best thing to do is to salvage the content and start over with a new site.
I know google is #1, but many people freak out at the thought that they may be banned by google for no reason really. There are two other big boys left (Y! and MSN) and you seem to be forgetting about them.
Hmm.. - Avoid buying links in Text-link-ads.com and from sites that explicitly sell links - Don't steal content - Don't generated automated content that is useless - No keyword stuffing - Don't put ur site in a ton of bad directories thats' basically it
I agree with you 100% everyone is a google fanatic, I personaly have more searches coming from bing and yahoo is just a little more than google in the past couple of months. This month alone I have over 400 searches from bing compared to 138 searches from google and 144 searches from yahoo. Just lately I have been getting a few searches from lyco's and alta vista. So if I suddenly fall out from google will it hurt that much I do not think so. I beleive the better traffic is coming from bing and yahoo. And the msn bots are having a field day every day with one of my sites that why it over 400 searches from google.