Ranking Penalty or Google Disregard?

I hear these stories about posting to digg getting people penalized on Google. So I thought I write a post clarifying what I think would make your site drop in rankings like a brick in the ocean:

Penalties are very real my friends. Whether you have a blog or a well established website, you can get into trouble for being naughty. So what does being naughty means. Basically, anything you do to take a shortcut in the SEO game is pretty much frowned upon (with some exceptions). Concepts such as keyword stuffing, link stuffing, cloaking & doorways, and link farming are all frowned upon by Google. But there are some exceptions!

The best example for an exception would be Link Buying. I have heard people claiming that your rank would get dropped if you buy links. While no one can be sure about this, Google USUALLY does not ban you for buying links. They do so for selling them. In essence, you need to take an action that can be done only by you for Google or other search engines to ban you.

You may have heard that using a software such as Web Position to check your ranks could get your banned on Google. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It can get your IP banned but not your site. Why? Because someone else (your competitors) could run the software day and night to get you banned. The same would be possible with Link Buying. What keeps your competitors from buying links to your site to get you banned.

So in order to get banned on Google, you need to do the following:

• Implement a tactic (shortcut) that is frowned upon by Google.
• Be the only person who can possibly do such thing!

Using this analogy you can pretty much tell that getting links from digg cannot get you banned nor can adding the webmasters tool to your account (believe me some SEOs claim that Webmasters tool got them penalized on Google!).