Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

SEARCH ENGINE GUIDELINES AND PENALTIES

The search engines have published guidelines.7 Violate any of those guidelines and you risk having your site demoted in ranking or removed from the index. The spirit behind the search engine guidelines is that the search engines reserve the right to take action on any sites that intentionally try to manipulate their ranking algorithms—which makes sense, since core to the search engines is the relevance of their results. If sites are manipulating those results and making them less relevant and useful to searchers, the engines have methods of pinpointing that and adjusting for it.

Search engines (Google in particular) have published a number of examples of what might constitute results manipulation. Generally, these are pretty straightforward and likely sound very similar to the spammy tactics the SEO naysayers incorrectly attribute to SEO. But the examples also serve as a check for those who aren’t spammers who may have lost sight of what’s really important about search acquisition in their focus on rankings.