I have read in posts around the web about google and penalties. The discussions led me to believe there was a way to check whether or not google was penalizing sites.

I would like to know if there is a way to check this and if anyone would know what it, short of calling google.

Thanks

Hey dsunker.
Goog "Matt Cutts" and read his blog and articles - he is the "G00gle Guy" and has written plenty of info on this topic.

I wonder if Google penalize a site, do they only penalize the pages that they don't like or do they penalize the whole site? You can find out how many of your pages are indexed by using "Google Analytics".

Or use a Goog switch like this...in the search box, type: "site:mysite.com" and hit enter

>>No quotation marks and replace "mysite" with your domain - no www needed

>>Looks like about 1720 cached pages

It has been our experience that even if your site is still indexed (can be verified as described above) there are additional penalties google may levy on a site including a lowering of SERP and even a complete removal from showing up on certain keyword searches. These penalties may be the result of changing your title tag, using duplicate content, or keyword spamming.

Once you correct these issues, in most cases you need to wait and see.

I'll share one secret... ok maybe a few... Here's a great site to visit:
http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

When I started my business in 2004 I knew nothing about SERP or rankings or any SEO anything for that matter. SEO was a new term. Google Bombing was the way to get traffic; link farms were everywhere. I was a student in college studying medicine, I was unemployed and took something from my past experience and thought, I can do this better. Many nights up till 3 am reading and reading (webproworld.com), getting up at 6 to travel to school, raising 2 step kids it was an endless battle on the web and something I had to learn to succeed.

My first year on the web I sold $1400.00, learned all about google sandbox(Yes I believe it exists, but there is a way around it), link building, meta and title tags, and other stuff about the web that I didn't even know existed. By the second year I had sold around $15,000 not bad coming from 1400, but I wanted more and I wanted to know more. Another year of school and this time I took business and accounting, I even signed up for programming the next year but didn't finish it. I quit school to focus on business and now we have over 200 websites (Yes, our NS Site is the best one by any means). We have a staff that I hand selected to emphasize customer satisfaction. We rank about 6 times per page for certain keywords meaning we get 60% of the business, or in plain terms we show up 6 of the top 10 listings (Yes I can give you the information to view these results, PM me) and they have 0 page rank in google. Others may only be 3, but 3 out of 10 isn't bad. Pagerank isn't all it's cracked up to be. Of course you want to know how we do that, and that is for another day I'm afraid.

About your question above I wouldn't worry about it. The main things that "I" would tell you are:

• Get listed in DMOZ (Sorry, it's a necessary evil, and read the instructions) Yes, I know businessformsworld.com isn't listed yet. It doesn't have to be but it helps out. Be sure to submit to your LOCALITY as well as your SPECIALTY.
• Make sure your xml sitemap is correct OPERATIONS > SETTINGS > SEO (Get a google account)
• Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools
• Sign up for Google Analytics
• Sign up for Bing Webmasters
• Sign up for Yahoo Explorer
• Use a live chat software and provide a phone number for customers to contact you. For those of you who don't use this you are missing information that google won't show you. Live chat tracks visitors through the pages they visit and you can see where they are leaving. (Well, the chat software we use does)

Google, which is of course the main player, will tell you in Webmaster tools if your tags are bad.

If you need help understanding the information visit our site and use the live chat feature to contact me, if I'm not on someone can usually find me or send me a PM.

I'm done for the night, wishing all great sales....