Over the years, there have been dozens if not hundreds, of theories on possible Google penalties and filters being used in the Google ranking algorithms. Joe Whyte provides an excellent roundup of many of those filters and penalties that the search forums have debated over the years. I am not getting into the debate on if these filters or penalties exist and I won’t say if his “workarounds” work. Here is a listing of the what he comes up with:

1. Google Sandbox
2. Google -30
3. Google Bombing
4. Google Bowling
5. Google Duplicate Content Filter
6. Google Supplemental Results
7. Google Domain name Age Filter
8. Google’s Omitted Results Filter
9. Google’s Trust Rank Filter
10. links.htm page filter
11. Reciprocal Link Filter
12. Link Farming Filter
13. CO-citation Linking Filter
14. To many links at once Filter
15. To many Pages at once filter
16. Broken Link Filter
17. Page Load Time Filter
18. Over Optimization Filter
19. Keyword Stuffing Filter
20. Meta Tag Stuffing Filter
21. Automated Google Query Filter
22. IP Class Filter
23. Google Toolbar Filter
24. Click through Filter in serps
25. Traffic Filter

Some filters off the top of my head that he may have missed include:

• Google’s Two Word Keyword Filter? (details)
• Country Specific Filters & Weights (story)
• The Network Filter (story)
• The Hyphen Filter (story)

Oh, and let’s not forget the Name That Filter Game from a year and a half ago.

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Spamming

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz