What things can cause a site to be penalized ??

a)Please can you name a list of factors which cause a site to be penalised.

b)What is the definition of a penalized site, from googles point of view?

Does it mean your website ranking goes low for a search term it was ranked high for?

Does it mean the site gets banned?

 

Unless it goes really really low its not penalized.

Black techniques like keyword stuffing, doorway pages could get your site penalized.

 

over optimisation of page could be a cause of penalisation. This would include:

keyworks stuffing
usage of bold and italics to much
usage of H tag for keyword stuffing
just over doing any optimisation

you could also be penalised for bad neighborhood linking

 

If a site is being penalized, that means it will be totally taken off from appearing in google search. Usually that happens if you get involved in blackhat SEO methods like keyword stuffing, link farming,....

 

Avoid doing un ethical techniques

 

I just got slapped with what looks like a minus thirty penalty in the last two weeks so I've done some research into this.

To sum it up, I'd say these small penalties are from "over-optimization."

Keyword stuffing, too many backlinks with identical anchor text for high competition keywords, identical link profile with another domain...

I didn't do anything "bad" but I got excessive with "white hat" techniques and there's no doubt there was some sort of penalty involved. Indexed pages dropped by about 25% and the highest PR page totally fell off the SERPs.

I added some new fresh content and spent less time worrying about links, this got all my pages indexed again. Still trying to get the over-optimized page to where it should be so I don't have a full solution for ya

 

Adding Duplicate content, (or) adding just the keywords can make your site get penalized.

 

To me a google penalty is one of 2 things. You either get completely deindexed from the search engine for an established site (really bad, but common for newish sites still not yet established) or you lose really good rankings for keywords you should be ranking for.

 

Also you can loose pr [considered to be penalty by some ] if you are found doing link sales

 

Google's webmaster guidelines provide a pretty good idea of what to do / not to do, but I too have been penalized for "over optimization" before ( 1 or 2 pages drop)