When a Google penalty is handed out, the organic search rank of a site can take a long time to recover and in the past week a significant number of manual actions taken against bloggers have revealed that there are plenty of ways in which to attract the ire of the search giant, according to Search Engine Land.
Webmasters should not have been surprised by this, since an official blog post from the Google Webspam Team posted in March was focused specifically on the issue of sites providing links to third party pages in exchange for free products to review.
This trading of links for free products is against Google’s guidelines, since it is construed as being an active attempt to artificially boost the rank of pages which have not earned inbound links organically.
