There are, of course, solutions to this that will appease both website designer and search engine optimizer. As a suggestion, consider using standard rollovers and/or CSS formatting to develop a graphically pleasing navigation menu. Unlike most JavaScript menus, neither standard rollovers nor CSS will "hide" your website's links, allowing search engines to freely crawl and index your websites pages.

If a JavaScript navigation menu is truly needed to attain desired look and feel of your website, than consider adding text-based links elsewhere on your website's pages, such as bottom. Bottom navigation schemes consisting of text-based links are becoming very common now-a-days, as they ultimately provide your website's visitors, and search engines, with another source for navigating. Another suggestion would be to develop and allow access to a sitemap containing all of your website's pages.

Flash vs. HTML - Flash is a pain in sides of all SEO consultants... but it doesn't have to be. It is possible to mix Flash with HTML to create a search engine friendly website that still allows for a rich media experience.

My suggestion for when developing a website using Flash is to create separate pages, those in Flash and others in HTML. Not only will you be giving your website's visitors a choice of which version he or she would like to view (which most will appreciate), but you will also be giving your website chance to be indexed and ranked through your HTML versions. A very good compromise if you ask me.

Dynamic Websites - Depending on how your particular system is configured and how your website's dynamic pages are created, use of dynamic websites can either be a great thing or a very terrible thing. Because dynamic web pages are data-based driven and are created on fly, they are usually assigned URLs containing very large and strange looking parameters. These parameters, amongst other reasons, are needed in order to sort products and generate a central navigation for your website's visitors. At same time, these parameters make it very difficult for many search engines to crawl, follow, or index your website's pages.

My suggestion to this problem is to consult with your development team, and your search engine marketing consultant, and have them consider developing your content management system using either ASP (Active Server Pages) or CFM (Cold Fusion). Either one of these "dynamic scripting languages" has possibility of converting URL's query string from "?" (which will usually stop a search engine from indexing page) into "/". This process, and a few others, maybe all that is needed in order to give your dynamically driven web pages opportunity to be indexed.

In my experience, designers who understand these and other common search engine friendly design issues are perfectly capable of designing around them, without sacrificing their design or future search engine rankings. As long as designer and search engine optimizer come together in very beginning, as opposed to after website has been created, than finding a compromising solution to each of their needs should not be a problem.

I am a search engine marketing consultant and I have been developing, maintaining, and successfully ranking websites since 2003.

5) Linking to bad neighborhoods Bad neighborhoods are designed to increase your Web site's ranking or is Web site's using Spam techniques to increase search engine ranking. You should not link to any Web page that uses Spam techniques to increase ranking. You also should not join link exchanges that are designed to improve ranking or Page Rank. If you are not aware of linking to any Web site like this, you should check each outbound link on your Web site.

6) Buying links for Search engine ranking This where a Web site owner buys links just to increase his or her ranking. This is also used to increase Page Rank. Google and other search engines still have a hard to detect this, but they are starting to catch on to this technique. If Google is aware of site, they can just discount Page Rank, so they can't pass Page Rank on.

7) Machine Generated Web sites This is a site that generates hundreds of web pages that are basically same page repeated hundreds or thousands of times, but with a few unique lines of text and unique title. Often times, search engines can't spot this, if done right by site owner. However, if a spider doesn't spot your machine generated Web pages, a competitor might find it and report your Web site.

What to do after you are Spam clean? Once you have cleaned up your Web site, you can try contacting Google by visiting http://www.google.com/contact/. Tell them that you made a mistake and won't do it again. Even if you do contact Google, they most likely won't let your Web site back in and if you happen to get back in, you better keep your Web site squeaky clean because I doubt you will get other chance.

If you can't get in touch with Google, I suggest that you wait for a few months after Google's spider visits your Web site and see if you get your ranking back or at least where you can see that your ranking is going up in search results. During this time you should not change your Web site around much and give search engines time to spider your Web site.

I really don't think that many Web sites have dropped because Google is penalizing them. Instead, I think Google has changed factors or adds more weight to a factor(s) that they use to rank Web sites in search results. All search engines make periodic changes to way they rank Web sites in search results, so don't be surprised if one week you rank number one and next week you rank 30TH.