Today I am going to spend some time focusing on off page optimization factors that over 50 percent of website owners are currently doing resulting in being penalized or even banned by Google altogether.

There are some common myths that people have regarding backlinking campaigns (ie. getting other websites to link back to you). Some of these misconceptions are that page rank 0-1 websites won't help your ranking. Another misconception is that you will be panelized or banned from Google by having unrelated websites linking back to you. Another common misconception is that you will get penalized by having a link farm linking back to your website.

The bottom line is that you can only get banned or penalized by Google as a result of your linking campaign if there are penalized websites linking back to you. Let me take an example. You have set up a link exchange with a PR4 website. Two months go by and you are still happily linking to that person. However, in those two months that website has been utilizing black hat SEO strategies that I have discussed on another occasion and this has resulted in them being penalized or banned by Google. Unfortunately for you, you are still linking to that website which now has a very bad reputation with Google and as a result Google could impost some heavy penalties upon you without you or your website actually doing anything "wrong".

To find out if a website has been gray barred by Google simply go to that website and look at the Google toolbar page rank result at the top of your web browser. You can download the Google toolbar for free if you don't already have it. If the toolbar is completely gray it means the site has been banned by Google. That's why it's highly recommended that you go back every once in a whileonce a month is a good guideto websites that are linking to you to make sure they have not been penalized in any way by Google.

In fact, if you do discover that one of your link partners has been penalized or barred by Google just deleting them from your links page could result in a dramatic increase to your ranking almost immediately. If you notice that any of your link partners have a page rank of 0 this could easily mean they have a brand new website and don't have a Google page rank yet. It could also mean that they have been banned. A way to find this out is by looking to see if the website is still indexed by Google.

Let's say for argument sake that you have a link partner with a page rank of 0. Simply go to Google and type in their url into the search box. If it is a new site that may not appear in the index. However, if the website is not new then the probability is that they have been banned by Google and you should stop any association with them.