Can good penalize a site, and stop it ranking under a keyword permanently

[willcraig]

hi all

we recently took on a new client, asking us to improve there google ranking,

under the term letting agents glasgow , they told us they used to rank top 10 but now are on page 14

so it looks like google has slapped them one, my question is

can google block you permanently from ranking under a keyword or disadvantage you,

as we went though the customers links, and removed the ones that looked strange, and kept the links that looked ok.

but then there ranking dropped to 21, is it worth gaining new links under there main keyword even tho it looks like google is punishing them for having some bad links.

the site is www. fine..lets...ltd...co....uk all one word

cheers

[MarieHaynes]

What is the keyword they are trying to rank for?  A brief look at their site shows me that there really isn't much content and the title tags aren't optimized.  They mostly all start with "Fine Lets Ltd" which I'm guessing is not the keyword they are trying to rank for.

So, this could be good news because there are lots of things that could be done to help them rank better.  I'd be more concered if the site looked amazingly optimized and it was still ranking poorly.

[MSSTORAGE]

The site is likley to be penalised as long as the site is breaking the webmaster guidelines. If you believe that you have corrected the issues causing the penalty you can ask google to reconsider your site here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

Good Luck

[SteveOllington]

That's not a penalty, it's just losing rankings... happens all the time. And yes Google can put permanent punishment on do but they don't tend to, in fact my understanding is it would be extremely rare... and if they did do that, it wouldn't be just for one keyword. If they penalize you, you fix the issue causing it and ask for re-inclusion. But that's not what's happened to your client. It could be the Panda/Farmer update or any number of things.