Hey guys, what are the symptoms of a google penalty? Content not being indexed? No PR? (grey bar)? Right now my site ranks on the 4th page for my main keyword even though I have good on-site SEO and just as much backlinks as the top-10 competitors. I do rank on the first page for many other side-keywords though... How to know if a site is being penalized? Thanks
It's about how old the backlinks are too. Even if you have the same, they are not all weighted the same.
It could be the quality of the backlinks and age of the site. Hard to answer without knowing the site.
Could be a lot of different things but if your site is still ranking for some of your other keywords then it is most likely not a penalty.
Perhaps it's overoptimization on a certain keyword to warrant a sudden drop in a keyword's ranking. Not a horrible penalty, recoverable.
cant predict without the knowledge bout site...just go and build some contextual links for that main keywords of yours.
Once I had a text for SEO purpose on a site and I think it wasn't Google friendly so my website got a penalty: PR drop from 3 to 2. After I removed that text the PR went back to 3 (a week later).