Do you really have a penalty

For long time there have been wrong assumptions on what constitutes a penalty in Google. Few years back Google has very less penalties but now we have lots of different type of penalties that Google can impose on a site to stop it from ranking. We have few of the penalties listed here
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-problems.htm
So what really constitutes a penalty and do you really have one?
Here is a simple checklist to see whether you have a penalty or not.
Your site has been ranking for a long time but suddenly almost all the major keywords disappeared and only you rank for obscure keywords – YES you have one
Your URL is removed from search results and you cannot find your site on top even searching for your unique domain name itself – Yes you have a penalty.
If there is a notification in webmaster tools that your site is violating guidelines and has been removed – Yes you have one.
One particular keyword has been ranking for a long time but suddenly it moves beyond rank 100. Yes you have link penalty.
Sitelinks to your disappear when it used to be there before and a search for yourdomain.com without www doesn’t bring up your site. But your site comes up when www is added to yourdomain.com. Yes you have a potential link buying / selling penalty.
If one keyword suddenly moves below 3 pages and never comes back even after 3 months. Yes it’s what we call -30 penalty check the SEO problems page in the above link.
Penalties are not something we need to be worried. Even the worst penalties can be removed by explaining to Google. If you have trouble with your site don’t hesitate to contact me and our team we will be ready to help you.

Caffeine update datacenter goes offline:

Mattcutts in his recent post said caffeine is ready to go live. Most people are happy with the results in caffeine datacenter and it seems Google is making it live. They have already took down the test datacenter at www2.sandbox.google.com
When i visit that URL i get this message:”Thank you! We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox. Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

Most of our sites and our client sites are doing exceptionally well in this particular datacenter and i am happy to see it go live. One particular client whom we have been doing work for about 2 years now is doing exceptionally well. I am sure he will be the happiest person to see his site do so well. I feel this update brings a lot of happiness among users.

Matt cutts says in his comments the delay for a full role out is because of the worry it will create on webmaster’s mind. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/ I was just stunned to see a response like that from a senior Googler. Because Google gave a damn for anyone’s website. I can remember back in 2003 when we had the great infamous Florida update it make lots of webmaster cry and even lot who depended on Google went out of Business. People were yelling but Google never cared. Good to see Google care for webmasters a lot these days.

Pagerank update after a long wait:

It seems Google has started to move away from PageRank or at least they are trying their best to make people move on from their PageRank obsession. PageRank from the day it came into existence has been the talk of the search engine world. Almost all webmaster knows about PageRank and its importance. Even lot of webmasters go one step ahead and learn how PageRank works and find short cut ways to get high PageRank.

Google is well aware of this PageRank obsession and they are doing their best to stop it. Recently Google removed PageRank from webmaster tools. They used to say which page is the most popular on your site every month in webmaster tools now they removed it from there. Just do a Google search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=pagerank+removed&rlz=1R2GGLL_en&aq=f&oq=&aqi= and you will see how many blogs are talking about this news. Just a simple thing and people talk about it to the core. It just illustrates the importance of PageRank and its obsession on people’s mind.

Now after a long time Google has updated its toolbar PageRank. You can see from this list ( http://www.searchenginegenie.com/google-toolbar-PageRank-update-list.html ) last PageRank update was end of June and this once has come after almost 4 months. That’s virtually just 3 updates a year.
Before we used to have updates every 20 days. People just wait to see their green bar increase on Google toolbar. Now that has gone down since every site has to wait at least 4 months to get PageRank or see any update / upgrade / downgrade to their PageRank. I feel Google is doing the right thing by moving people away from PageRank obsession. I hope Google maintains the current trend.