Recently in Google's blog there was a post that told how to get high rankings on their search engine results. So what is the secret? While they weren't really telling us anything we didn't already know, they did confirm a few very important things.

What does it mean to be penalized by Google? If Google believes that you are guilty of so called "black hat" SEO behavior then your site may be penalized. A penalized site will virtually disappear from all search engine results because Google essentially wipes all indexing history for the site. This is basically the worst thing that can happen to any webmaster and the best way to avoid it is to steer clear of questionable SEO behavior. Spammy content, paid link exchanges, etc. - these will all potentially get your site penalized by the search engines.

The first step to showing up in Google's search results is to have Google index your site. And you want Google to index every page of your site but this doesn't always happen. In fact, if you don't have a good enough page rank then Google probably won't index your whole site, especially if the site is large. One way you can increase your chances of being indexed is by keeping the search engine spiders away from your lower quality pages. You can block these spiders with proper robots.txt directives.

Yesterday we talked about how to know if you've been banned by Google. Today we're going to talk about one of the possible reasons you may have been banned. Sometimes your robot.txt file is inserted improperly. This file tells the search engines what to do when they spider your site. If your tags are wrong then you may be the reason Google isn't indexing your site. Look carefully at how this file is tagged and make sure it isn't keeping Google from spidering your important pages.

Things are going along nicely on your site, you're getting visitors and a lot of that traffic is coming from Google searches. Then suddenly the traffic stops. What happened? It could be that your website has been banned from Google. This means that Google no longer indexes any pages from your site and you are essentially invisible. The Google ban is usually reserved for the website equivalent of spam but Google does occasionally make mistakes.

When someone publishes a new site that they want Google to notice, they fill out Google's submission form. The only problem with this is that it can take several weeks for Google to get to it. A much quicker way to get Google's attention is by getting an established website to link to you. This will give you almost instantaneous attention.