The recent penalization of blogs by Google, caused an uproar in the blogging community, such as exclusion from Google search result which can be detrimental to your blog traffic

Well what caused this and how bloggers can avoid such penalization

For one, aside than doing paid links and gaming the system to increase your PageRank, did you know that if your blog is linked to a bad neighbourhood, you can be deemed as committing one of the Google TOS offense. Too many these offenses and you can be penalized

What is bad neighbourhood?

Bad neighbourhood means that you’re linking to sites that has spam/link related network. Checks for parts of certain words within them, such as “adult”, “sex”, and “pharma” (among others).

You should take care with who you link out to. Well you can check by using this online tool. It’s not 100% accurate but it will the least tell you who and what you’re linking to

The thing is, search engines don’t care, if it’s not of your knowledge that such outbound links on your blog is spammy.

It is just doing it’s job by spidering, put your blog link value through its algorithm and give out a certain output which says, if your blog has naughty outbound links. If it does, it is perceived as part of a spam/link network and thus you getting penalized or banned

So how to avoid such penalty?

For one, use the tool above. Secondly more or less, use good judgment. If someone offers your money to place ads on your blog and it has dodgy sites, would you accept it?

The sad thing is, we bloggers hugely depends on Google for traffic and when you get penalized, well you got to think if the money is worth the pending penalization by Google.