Web rankings for your website is a vital factor of your overall marketing campaign. There are ample techniques to achieve guaranteed search engine rankings. However, there are times when rankings plunge and websites are banned.

One good thing about search engines is that they can figure out spam sites and penalize them. Nevertheless, the drawback is that even bona fide sites doing legitimate SEO methods can be penalized. To protect your improved search engine rankings and to avoid getting penalized, you must wipe away any tinge of 'bad neighborhood' stigma.

Check your links. There might be active links to bad neighborhood sites. Say, sites that use black SEO techniques. Avoid linking to them.

Check your PageRank. If despite efforts you exerted on web search engine optimization, you site is still nowhere to be found. Your site might be banned or penalized. To check, download Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. The toolbar will reflect your PageRank from the scale of 1-10. Also, do not link to those sites that bear no PageRank. Search engines might have penalized them.

Avoid cloaking. Another vicious trick of webmasters is cloaking. The latter is the technique of hiding keywords in such a way that they are invisible to viewers but pretty much visible to search engines. Webmasters use the same text color as that of the background color of the page to do the cloaking. Fortunately, some search engines can now figure out and penalize sites using this technique. The only downside is that even innocent sites may be punished. Moreover, avoid using texts with identical or almost similar color of your background.

To be safe, be sure to avoid bad SEO techniques.