No one gets a site penalty on purpose. Sometimes it happens through carelessness, sometimes through black-hat techniques and, sometimes, through honest SEO mistakes.We’ve watched four such mistakes happen recently. These sites were honestly attempting to follow SEO best practices, but they were penalized.

Link-Leveraged Business Relationships

The problem explained: Many businesses create relationships with other businesses. As a way of cementing the relationship, the businesses offer to create links to one another in order to enhance SEO and click-through traffic.

Sometimes, however, these good intentions — trading links — end up hurting one or both of the sites.

Example: A major online retailer of greeting cards — we’ll call them “FaithCard” — entered into a relationship with a major brick-and-mortar retailer, “AM Stores.”

Every AM Store (and there are thousands of them) carried FaithCard’s products. FaithCard’s arrangement with AM Store provided a discounted product price, as long as AM Store’s website would include a link to FaithCard’s website.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate linking can either help SEO or it can kill it. It all depends on how you implement it.It’s true, and it leaves many SEOs scratching their heads to how exactly to deal with affiliate links.

The Problem Explained: Online affiliate relationships are big business. For the most part, they’re spam free. Companies can engage in affiliate relationships without fear of penalization.

But if a company goes into affiliate linking willy-nilly, they can get bit.

Example: In my client’s case, they put together an in-house affiliate program pretty quickly and rolled it out without a very clear explanation to their affiliate partners.

Their business — we’ll call it “ZoomZoomPic” — did brisk sales in the stock photography business. Their affiliate program was designed to help existing customers gain some income while also growing their subscriptions.