*
On SEO forums one of the most often discussed topics are Google penalties. Webmasters seek help to determine whether and why they have been penalised by Google. They also want to know how to deal with the penalty once it’s established that they have been hit by one.
What is a Google penalty and what isn’t? There seem to be different definitions floating around.
While Google employees will tell you that many SEO issues described as penalties aren’t actually penalties, most people seem to consider sudden and unexplained ranking and/or search traffic drops as a penalty. They at least suspect they have been subjected to a penalty.
Today I’d like to assist webmasters in determining whether they have been hit by an actual Google penalty by listing common reasons for getting penalised by Google.
Some of them are simply Google filters that deal with overtly manipulative SEO techniques. Some of these aren’t penalties at all, but I list them here as well because they are often mistaken for a penalty.
So just check out this list of ways to get penalised by Google. Many of them are high risk SEO tactics considered to be black hat by some.
Backlinks
Large parts of the SEO industry still focus on link building or getting links to improve search engine visibility especially on Google. There is nothing wrong with that. Of course there are limits. There are now so many pitfalls to link building that you have to be very exact when it comes to following the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
- 5000 links for $19 – dubious offers from spam emails offering you 5000 links for $19 are too good to be true. They lead almost directly to a penalty.
- Paid links on high PR sites – while you can get away with paid links in many cases, it’s quite easy to get noticed when you buy links on so-called high PR sites where the toolbar PageRank is 6 and above. There are only a handful of sites that have PR9 and even the number of PageRank 8 sites is easy to monitor. PageRank sites like Piwik.org that have a ten are so obvious you could call Matt Cutts and tell him about it yourself.
- Reciprocal links on large scale – link exchange and reciprocal links are natural to some extent. I link out to bloggers who link to me on a daily basis. On the other hand, obvious and massive link exchange schemes or networks can be detected algorithmically, so you end up penalised sooner or later.
- Hidden links in WordPress themes or counters – these days many top ranking free WordPress themes sites are just SEO scams which rely on hidden links in the themes to be spread around. If you rely on such links for “link building”, it’s no wonder you are being penalised. Some visitor counters have done that in the past as well.
- Artificial link profile with always matching anchor text – when every single link to your site is well optimised saying something like “SEO company” this might look too artificial to stay unnoticed by Google.
- Wrong language links – an English site having thousands of links from Russia or China makes me go hmmm. Google engineers are smart enough to compare the language of your site and the sites that link to you. In the best case you just rank in Russia and China. Else you drop altogether.
- Gaining too many links too fast – it’s not always the more links the better. Even good links gained too fast can result in a penalty. Google is checking the link velocity – aka the rate in which you earn links – and if you get more links than you deserve, you risk a penalty even if the links are perfectly legit.
Outgoing links
Linking out is crucial for blogs and even static websites. Many webmasters stopped likning out in order to hoard PageRank. Google engineers have discouraged this and suggested linking out instead. Linking out can be risky though.
- Broken links – too many broken links on a page raise a red flag in the Google algorithm. This might not be a penalty in the strictest sense, but you drop suddenly in rankings once more than one or two links are broken on a page.
- Links to bad neighborhoods – even worse than 404 errors (aka broken links) are links redirected to so called bad neighbourhoods. Spammers even use this technique on purpose to fool you. Most such links happen more naturally as part of link decay. Sites disappear and domain grabbers buy them to display ad loaded “domain parking” pages.
- Too many outbound links or none at all – a site that has more outgoing links than content itself can lose its search visibility. This might not happen overnight like the typical penalty you’d expect, but it can amount to one in its effects. Also, sites that are dead-ends (that do not link out at all, or use use nofollow links out of the misguided belief that it’s good SEO) might get penalised completely.
- Hidden links in third party services (menus, widgets, counters) – free services for websites often have a rather sneaky business model. They sneak in a hidden link with their offering. It can be a CSS menu, a sidebar widget or a visitor counter. Sometimes these links are not only hidden; they are also off-topic and downright spammy. Look out and check the source code of stuff you add to your sites. Google, of course, doesn’t allow hidden links.
Content
Though Google always stresses that “content is king”, it also can mean trouble. If there is no king in your kingdom, or the king is dressed in rags, you look bad when the Google robots visit.
- Duplicate content – duplicate content on your own site or even elsewhere can result in a significant ranking drop. While Google does not consider this a penalty, most webmasters who experience the problem do.
- Low quality content – Google’s high quality update dubbed Panda focused on low quality content. Shallow, keyword-rich content on some pages can make your whole site drop in Google.
- Scraped content – scraped content, that is text taken from other sites and displayed on yours, is a surefire way to get downranked.
- Unreadable content – content that is written in broken English can be seen as scraped and then “spun” (some words get replaced with synonyms to fool Google), so make sure a human being understands what you write. Also, text decoration is crucial. Human quality raters employed by Google check that as well.
Ads
Analysts argue that Google is not a search engine but an advertising company as almost all revenue of the Google corporation stem from ads displayed in the search results themselves and on third party sites. Nonetheless, the pressure on Google has grown over the years to tackle the problem of so called MFA (Made for Adsense) sites that pollute the Google index. With Google “Panda” the search giant finally did.
- Too many ads (low content to ads ratio) – ever since Google “Panda” has been the talk of the town, most pundits have pointed out that a too high number of ads, especially Google Adsense ads, may lead to a penalty. I agree with that opinion.
- Affiliate sites with no value – Google always explained that affiliates are OK, but only as long as they offer some additional value beyond the actual affiliate offer. Be sure to add value or you will face a penalty sooner or later.
Bad press and reputation
The issue of so-called “SEO outing” has been a hot one in 2011, as numerous high profile websites have been outed and with them also their SEO teams or companies. Many SEO practitioners argue on moral grounds that outing is a despicable practice. They might be right, but as long as there is nothing to out you fare best. So you’d better manage your reputation online and from time to time check what the SEO team does.
- NYT and WSJ – high profile old media outlets like the NYT (New York Times) and the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) like to scandalise SEO, so if you get a call from a journalist you’d better not brag about your shady SEO tactics. Google, in most cases, reacts to high profile outings aka bad press.
- Industry blogs like SEO Book – some SEO industry blogs might focus their attention on your shady SEO business model when you get too flamboyant or obnoxious. Aaron Wall of SEO Book got so offended by the “SEO is bullshit” tirades of Mahalo owner Calacanis that he attacked his site for sites. Finally Google had to act, and penalised the thin-content site along with other offenders in the Google “Panda” update. Be sure not to slander the SEO industry if your online property is not 200% clean.
- Asking questions in official Google Groups – some disgruntled webmasters tend to speak out on Google groups or forums when they feel they have been singled out and penalised. Some of these webmasters have been penalised for a good reason. These people will be outed by Google employees in the worst case scenario when they don’t admit their mistakes and keep on complaining.
- Third party trust metrics like Blekko, WOT, McAfee Siteadvisor - if you don’t show up in Blekko, aka you are banned there, and when sites like WOT and SiteAdvisor list your site as deceptive or dangerous, this might mean you are heading towards a Google penalty. Google does not use these sites’ data but has other means to screen the Web for the same issues.
- Making Google look stupid – you don’t need an NYT article, a SEO blogger or Google employee to get penalised for a bad rep. Publicly showing off your black hat SEO successes makes you vulnerable to the “making Google look stupid” penalty. Leading SEO specialists agree that from a certain point on, Google can’t keep quiet about it and will penalise you in order to keep its face.
Google filters
Some Google penalties are just filters that are applied automatically. While many penalties can be both manual and automatic, some of the filters are obviously algorithmic.
- New domain (sandbox) – the so-called sandbox filter has been around for years, but was never officially acknowledged as far as I know. It applies when you change domains or start out with a completely new domain and site. Without a proper “moved to” sign Google will apply this penalty to old established sites as well when they change domains. Use a 301 redirect for old sites and try to gain a significant number of authority links in the early days of a new domain to beat this filter.
- Multiple h1 tags – a book has just one title. Likewise a web page has only one h1 title tag. Google assumes that multiple h1 tags are a trick to spam its index, and penalises sites using multiple h1 tags. Use h2, h3 and other headline tags instead.
- Keyword stuffing (high “keyword density”) – one of the oldest spam techniques is so called keyword stuffing. To this day, fake SEO specialists advise webmasters to ensure a high “keyword density” on your site. That’s nonsense. Be sure to add your keywords to your website copy, but no more than a few times. It’s more important to keep the text readable than any percentage of keywords. It might rather hurt you in Google.
Technical issues
Not every sudden drop in rankings and traffic is a penalty; some are stupidity or gross negligence. You can shoot yourself in the foot by messing with some technical aspects of web development.
- Robots.txt – the robots.txt is not really needed to improve SEO. It can break a lot of things though. Just recently I blocked one of my blogs from being indexed by Google. Of course I suspected a penalty at first but then checked Google Webmaster Tools to find out I made the mistake.
- Nofollow – I’ve seen leading blogs barred from the Google index because they activated the WordPress privacy mode. It simply meant that all of the blog was set to noindex, nofollow which equals blocking it in the robots.txt.
- Duplicate titles and descriptions – when your site uses the same or a very similar page title and description for every single page, it’s no wonder most of them won’t show up in search results. This isn’t a penalty either. It’s just logical.
- Not crawlable links in JavaScript – there are still JavaScript site menus out there that can’t get crawled by Google. Always check whether your menu uses real HTML links with “<a href=”">” in it. Or at least the whole URL must show up.
Neither a penalty nor your fault
In some cases a loss of rankings or search traffic has nothing to do with you or your site. Something else changed instead, and that’s why you get outranked all of a sudden.
- Algorithm change – Google changes and refines its algorithm all the time. Major changes are called updates, and sometimes mean dramatic shifts in search results. Just search for “Google Panda”. The only thing you can do then is to find out what changed and why your site does not match the new ranking factors.
- Competition got better – a common “problem” is also that your competition does more SEO work than you do and one day they outrank you. A ranking change from #1 to #2 on Google can mean a traffic loss of 60 to 80%.
- Current events – sometimes breaking news may push your site down. Google News results get displayed on top, and for less competitive phrases news media start to rank in regular results as well. Most of these ranking changes will vanish ofter a few days.
- SERP display change – Google experiments all the time with its search results’ display. Most notably, local results from Google Places take away large parts of the screen real estate. You might rank at #1 in organic results and still get displayed at the bottom of the search results page.
There are numerous reasons to see a search traffic slump one day out of the blue. It doesn’t have to be a penalty, but if you engage in some of the high risk SEO tactics mentioned above it can be one. Make sure you have at least two web analytics tools to check what happened. Google Analytics is not perfect and sometimes the ways it measures traffic get changed overnight without notification.
Just recently, traffic from Google Image Search has been quietly moved from the referrers to search engines (where it belonged in the first place).
Once both of your web statistics tools confirm the search traffic slump, you can check out this list of 33 ways to get penalised by Google to find out whether you’re a victim of one of them.
* Image by Alexandre Syrota.
Great article!
I have a question. In my website I archive a lot of information using a dynamic permlink. For example, I have the url pattern /2010/archive/form2/1232333. This permlinks generate a web page (with some parts equal and some other generated dinamically) that is different from /2011/archive/form2/1232333 . it could be considered spam ?. I am just trying to index all my database content for the www.
Thanks!
Chris
I quote: “Multiple h1 tags – a book has just one title. Likewise a web page has only one h1 title tag. Google assumes that multiple h1 tags are a trick to spam its index, and penalises sites using multiple h1 tags. Use h2, h3 and other headline tags instead.”
In HTML5 structure & semantics have changed. If used in the right way, multiple H1′s shouldn’t be any problem to Google SEO.
Site Pay Off
Article Header
Good post… but I disagree with a lot of your backlink penalties.
According to Google, links cant penalize the sites they are linking to. With the logic in this post, I should build a word press theme and put sneaky backlinks with exact anchor text all pointing to my competitors. And then go buy links for $19 pointing to them too (that’s a pretty cheap way to damage your competitors rankings). Sorry, those type of links only damage the sites that they are on… Not what they are pointing to. Otherwise, it would be chaos.
You could say that intitially those backlinks boosted you’re rankings, then Google figured it all out and stopped giving those links any value, thus could cause your rankings to drop. But that’s not a penalty. It was just artificial rankings.
Great overview. Don’t forget to mention the noarchive or nosnippet method!
“5000 links for $19 – dubious offers from spam emails offering you 5000 links for $19 are too good to be true. They lead almost directly to a penalty.”
No it doesn’t! If it did then we could all outrank each other by buying those links for our competitors sites, thus getting them dropped from the SERPs !
NYT and WSJ like to scandalize SEO? Is that true? Do you have any proof?
So does posting on blogs like this one get you penalized, or does it help?
Nice indept post.
@Kent – This is true, look at what happened to JC Penny. They used to rank for a ton of really competitive keywords due to buying a vast amount of PR links on fairly spammy sites.
@Aidan – I agree that you could just do this to your competitors and many webmasters are blasting out spammy links with viagra as the anchor text to their comps.
For an aged domain this will have little effect in the majority of cases. What you have to remember is it may be 5000 links, but about 40 links will end up being indexed, if even.
For newly established domains, the Google filter will be triggered and cause the site to go into the Google “sandbox”. The site usually comes back out.
My opinion is to avoid these type of links as best you can, why risk getting a site penalised.
Shane
Good article Tad.
IMO there is an easy check to see if you have been the object of a Google penalty.
Do a search for “site:domain.com” (no quotes) and seen what pages are listing.
If your target page lists near the top, and it is not showing for a regular keyword search, you probably have a penalty.
If none of your pages list then you really have a problem.
The sandbox is a distinct possibility if you manually submit your site to Google.
If it is found by their bot from a link on a relevant page, there is no sandbox.
The sandbox effect can also be imposed if you are making a number of title changes.
Gaining links too fast is indeed a method to gaining a penalty.
One of my favorite forums updated their PHPBB software and allowed dofollow from nofollow and my site gained over 10,000 links from my 1300 posts. As a good number of these links pointed to specific pages and anchor text were used, there should have been SERPs movement. There was not.
Google dropped me to PR3 from PR4.
However, this was the ONLY change. None of the pages dropped even 1 position for my targeted phrases.. Neither did my traffic drop.
The ONLY thing that happened was my PR dropped one point.
This reinforces their statement that PR “is only one of over 200 factors” applied to determine indexed position.
Links simply are not important enough any more to influence SERPs.
@Edgar
Google focuses strongly on h tags, and in a true visual semantic hierarchy there can only be one h1 regardless of the correctness of the code hierarchy
@Anthony
If you build in a bunch of sneaky links, then it is YOUR site that will be the object of the penalty.
If you place links on a bunch of ‘spammy’ sites you will get the penalty.
IMO it is not the in bound links themselves that do damage, but the lack of relevance between linked and linking pages.
@Aidan
You would be correct if links counted enough to affect SERPs.
However, links only affect PR and PR does not affect SERPs.
PR controls the frequency of bot visits.
Change affects the depth.
@Steve
It helps if you include a link and it is to a relevant page.
It helps both the linking and the linked pages, as the link is to relevant content which counts for the linking page’s information silo, and the linked page’s recommendations.
@Shane re @Kent
There is no proof that JC Penny was ranking highly BECAUSE of their linking, but only that there was a manual penalty applied on the phrases that were found on the spam links.
No spam links were found for the majority of their departments and those pages continued to rank well.
@Shane.
It is not that Google does not index the 5000 pages, but they only REPORT the 40.
I have about 13,229 links and Google reports I have 12.
Try looking at links using majesticseo.com
When you do your link building, do it for the traffic it will bring.
Do not concern yourself about paid or unpaid, (as long as the linking site advertises that links are paid).
I place links on paid tourism and manufacturing indexes without ill effect.
Forget about linking for SEO. It is strictly against Google’s TOS to do so.
And it is all about patterns.
I just had one of my sites jump from a PR4 to a PR6 and I had not placed more than 10 links to it in the year.
All of the links were built on pages built by graphic hobbyists linking to our plugin filters.
This also showed that Google has made considerable changes in the way PR is calculated.
The majority of the pages I checked that linked to us were of low PR.
I have PR3 sites with over 35,000 inbound links to a PR6 site with 18,000+ IBL’s.
I had a site achieve a PP4 with 115 links.
113 on PR0 pages.
I believe that Google has gone from a strictly mathematical formula where the higher PR sites made for more ‘link juice” being passed, to one where the relevance between linking and linked pages counts more.
The numerical value is left as an indicator for the public, but their calculations are based on relevance, not authority.
In May 2008 Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality posted about PageRank.
“….some are very complicated — for example, we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January. Most of the time we look for improvements in relevancy, but we also work on projects where the sole purpose is to simplify the algorithms.”
The Mayday update in 2009 confirms they made PR algo changes.
best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com
@Edgar
Google focuses strongly on h tags, and in a true visual semantic hierarchy there can only be one h1 regardless of the correctness of the code hierarchy
WIth HTML5 there can now be multiple H1 tags on the same page, just as there can be multiple H2, h3 ect, and footers and headers.
It’s semantically segregated but it’s a common practice. For this reason I’d be surprised if Google penalises webmasters for having more than one H1 tag on the page.
I don’t totally agree with all the points but it’s an interesting list. Concerning language, I don’t think you get a penalty if your website is spanish for example and 80% of your links come from everywhere in the world. Example: Ronaldo soccer star’s website…
Thank you really a lot for the fantastic details. There’s definately alot to understand and as I appear about I maintain hearing diverse points of view. Some that are very wise and other folks that are quite unbelievable. I’ll return with some far better feedback and an belief of my individual soon after I feel assured plenty of to kind an view value stating.
What about bad code? Clummsy code in a page, does this effect site as well?
@Andy Walpole
There is a difference in semantic hierarchy for code and relevance.
a h1 in code means a certain sized text on the page and more than one instance can be used.
Google uses h1 to determine the main keyword phrase on the page and there can only be one of these.
@Aman, if the code is bad enough to cause problems, it will count against you.
Normally Google does not care about code. It is the visual display they check.
Ehh… take this article with a grain of salt.
“Google assumes that multiple h1 tags are a trick to spam its index…”? What about HTML5….? That’s completely untrue.
Keyword stuffing is still necessary, but it’s all about placement, amount of relative content, link juice, and more.
Robots.txt isn’t needed for SEO? Say what? I don’t know about you but I like to tell searches engines not to scan my admin & protected directories, as well as directories I just don’t want people accessing. It’s very important to tell search engines where to “go” and where “not to go”.
Also, nofollow is fine for SEO. Although it doesn’t increase the value of the other links on the page as admitted by Google, it does help with telling Google not to waste its time with certain pages and focus on others.
Cheers,
D
Should a healthy code to content ratio be a concern?
Google does not care about code to content ratio.
It is not necessary to stuff ANYTHING.
It is all about presentation and position.
If multiple h1′s are used how does the human reader tell which one is the title?
If you use your CSS to vary the text size on multiple h1 tags, making one larger, you are telling people one thing and Google another.
For SEO the h1 tag has to be the largest text on the page.
If you make some of the h1 text smaller, it is not the most important and the corresponding tag should be used, not the h1
Building too many links too fast. I think this filter is based on the percentage increase. So if a new website has 10 links and builds out 100 links in a month, that is a 1000% increase and sure to raise a red flag.
This has happened to me where I built too many links for a client that had none. They took a hit for about 3 months.
But if your website has 50,000 links and you build 5000, this only represents a 1% increase.
Very interesting discussion about multiple H1 tags, and how HTML5 may change the game with respect to this.
Hi, it took almost half an hour to read the post. Great content. I’ve heard some wordpress themes and joomla templates use the technique of hidden links. Is there a way to check that before using the theme?
Great post!
There is just one point I wouldn’t agree with. How come rankings can go down by a few broken links on a page? It would be great if you could explain that a bit further as I’ve never noticed anything like that.
Great post.
My site’s been hit by a -950 penalty and I’ve been trying to revive it for months. The only thing it ranks for is it’s brand name and even that bounces from #5 to #185 on a regular basis. It’s a new site and I had first page rankings for a couple weeks before it tanked. I’ve made many mistakes including lack of content with affiliate links, scraped Amazon reviews, many anchor text links, etc. It now has only original content with very few affiliate links, yet no lift on the filter and it’s been a couple months. Google’s reconsideration request said it’s algorithmic. I’ve desperately been seeking a solution and am contemplating switching domains.
I’m glad I read this post. I’m not sure about the H1 debate, but that’s the one thing on my site that I see that could be causing the filter. I several H1 tags on each page. Taking them off now. I’ll report back if this escapes the filter.
@Tony: I’ve exactly the same problem as you do for one of the sites I manage! Tried everything, corrected all the content and had a professional writer review it, got new links, made sure it would provide a valuable service by offering a comparison between stores (it is a comparison shopping site with different affiliate programs selling the same products at different prices), removed and 301 all that could be considered duplicate content to only one version, etc.. The only thing I got from the reconsideration request was that the site doesn’t have any sort of manual penalty… I’m going crazy! I have a great amount of facebook followers, plenty of twitter mentions and a few hundred google +, but still nothing and it is killing my income! This has been going on for 6 months…
Very nice lengthy article, Tad Chef.
Apart from a few of the more consistent ” Must do ” things Google requires, there are just so many(Especially with 500 plus Algorithm changes in the past 12 months)
I read a very long document regarding ” what Google Expects ” from websites.
This document came from the Horses mouth, so to speak.
Actually, my eyes got very sore trying to get through the whole thing. Much of the information needed to be looked over a few times, just to absorb what Google was actually getting at.
Also, I think a great deal of the information was aimed at high end sites.
Slightly off topic: I have become a little wary of using some of the Keyword, SEO research tools being offered, after I just noticed my webpages being De-indexed then receiving a message asking me to confirm I am not a robot.
I am not overly familiar with the term, though my first thoughts were ” Darn I have been sand-boxed” thinking Google had scrapped my site.
I sort of panicked and uninstalled the free software tool(A very well known brand) then went and checked to see if my pages were re indexed.
The pages were re-indexed so maybe I jumped the gun a little too fast when I went and uninstalled the software.
.
Sigh, more fear-mongering brought on by the Google super-PR machine.
“a site that has more outgoing links than content itself can lose its search visibility. ” – you mean like Yellowpages, Dmoz and BOTW? No, Google won’t discriminate against this practice per se. There are many sites that are nothing more than collections of outbound links, which do a lot of good. AND they consistently rank very well. Try a local search on just about any topic and you will see what I mean.
Buying cheap backlinks – I agree with the many who have already stated that this is rubbish. If this were true….then let’s all get together and go after Rip Off Report, for starters!
Gaining links too fast – there’s no proof or evidence that this is really an issue. Google would like you to believe this but they have no way of knowing what is real and what isn’t. Suppose you suddenly got some great press because a national talk radio host mentioned you and you get 1,000 links in a single day. Is Google going to “penalize” you for such “behavior”? Again, why can’t we all just get together and bomb Rip off Report and Wikipedia and ban those sites for good? I can think of a lot of people who would love to see those sites go away. If we all just contributed $50 and bought 10 million crappy links…bye-bye Rip off Report!
“duplicate content on your own site or even elsewhere can result in a significant ranking drop.” – not on your own site. Google knows that most ecommerce sites (for example) are going to have these issues so they cannot afford to be too unwieldy with this part of the algorithm. More than likely they will just ignore duplicate pages in your site. That doesn’t mean your rankings will drop.
@ Reg Charie – NBS-SEO “It is strictly against Google’s TOS to do so.” Google has no terms of service. Do you check a box agreeing to their TOS when you build a site? Do you check a box agreeing to their TOS before you search for something? Are you honestly stating that we have to abide by Google’s terms as it relates to our own web site? Stop being led around by the nose by this company, it’s really pathetic. Google is not the moral authority of the web! They do not own the web and they cannot give you “terms of service” for how you operate your own web site!
@ Reg Charie – NBS-SEO “the lack of relevance between linked and linking pages.” Another funny word, “relevance”. What’s relevance mean? If I get a link from CNN to my site, and my site has nothing to do with “the news of the day”, is Google going to penalize me? If I have a site that sells RV batteries and I get a link from a camping blog, that’s perfectly relevant to a human but Google won’t see that as relevant. The point is, this relevancy discussion is overblown. Google’s engine is actually very very weak on the relevancy part.
The bottom line is that Google is a for-profit company that is looking to sell advertising on its site and to make as high a profit as possible to make their shareholders happy. They do not care about the quality of the internet. They do not care if the web is polluted, nor should they. They need their organic results to be not just high-quality but also diverse, because otherwise people will stop using their search engine. Furthermore, Google automates as much as they can to keep their company profitable. Human beings do not get involves except to feed the algorithm some information that might help it “learn”. There are no Google engineers monitoring sites and links to catch and “red flag” people. Can you imagine how many requests PER DAY Google gets from webmasters looking to report their competitors practices? Do you actually think Google employes human beings that look at every request and then do something? Read what they say “your information will help us IMPROVE OUR ALGORITHM”.
Google has done a tremendous job spreading fear to make SEO companies and webmasters do their work for them. The algorithm has significant holes that are easy to exploit, and difficult for Google to fix. So they have tirelessly worked to make us do most of the labor at keeping spammers at bay. Notice that whenever someone starts talking about “proof” of bad link building the only name anyone can bring up is JC Penney. To me, that’s just proof Google CAN’T stop what you do.
To many adds just put your click rate up. You will find it a lot easer to just have adds on high traffic pages. I know how tempting it can be to put loads on one screen.