Google 950 Penalty

• Postscript – the 950 penalty lasted for 2 weeks and then disappeared – Overcoming Google 950 Penalty

The Google 950 penalty is no joke. Overnight all your search engine rankings can fall by upto 950 places. Search terms where you used to rank number 1 or 2 will suddenly appear at the end of the search results, e.g. number 950.

Some webmasters report a slightly less severe penalty of 30-40. But a fall of 30-40 places is nearly as good as a fall of 900.

This seemed to happen to biographyonline.net on 27th June. Suddenly traffic from Google dried up. Bizarrely, rankings on MSN and Windows Live, have been booming in recent weeks.. On Yahoo and MSN rankings are quite high for some keywords. But, fortunately or unfortunately, it is Google’s search engines that matter. Google has at least 50% of search engine traffic, if you can’t rank on Google it is a real disaster.

There are several possible explanations for a penalty like this:

These are the potential causes of a 950 Penalty

1. Splog.

Your website is a splog. Nearly all your content is duplicated. Google have just realised this and so they want to stop giving you search engine traffic

2. Google are Incompetent.

To reduce a ranking 950 places overnight, is an admission of failure. Either they were wrong to have the site at number 1, or they are wrong to have it at number 950. Both can’t be right A good search engine would not be making such huge changes. Also the fact that it can apply to every page on the site, shows Google is not discriminating. Yes, some pages on a site maybe duplicated; but why penalise every page, even if it is not duplicated. If you search “John Chow” There is a good chance you would like to find johnchow.com. On 2nd July, www.johnchow.com is not there (because of a Google penalty), this means search engines users would be better off using another search engine.

However, Google may respond by saying these penalties make people talk about Good SEO practices, they are only temporary, and because they generate a lot of noise they act as a deterrent for other people to try SEO tricks. Therefore, a bit of short term pain leads to better search engines in the long run. For example, bloggers would be wary of repeating John Chow’s experiment to get more links.

3. Over optimisation

If you participate in dubious link exchanges. I.e. with link farms e.t.c this could give you a bad reputation. Google may wish to penalise you for engaging in SEO tricks. Also if you gain a high number of links overnight, this may cause overoptimisation signals to be triggered. See: google and over optimisation

4. Bad HTML.

On some webmaster forums I have heard people say broken html and CSS lead to penalties, but personally I seriously doubt this. Validation of HTML and CSS has never been a significant factor in search engine ranking, it doesn’t make sense.

5. Made for Adsense Site

It is argued that websites which heavily optimise for adsense and other affiliate programs are more liable to attract penalties. Google make no secret of their desire to hit “made for adsense sites”

6. Duplication of content on Site.

If you have the same article several times on a website, this can be viewed as an SEO trick to boost rankings.

Black Hat SEO tricks. In Google guidelines they warn against the creation of gateway pages, hidden text e.t.c. I don’t know whether people still try to get away with things like this. However, everyone I know who has received a 950 penalty has always claimed they do not do this. I tend to believe them, it seems to be something new.

7. Manually picking up on sites.

Again, I doubt this. Google always say they prefer using algorithms to determine rankings. However, it is possible people may complain about Made for adsense sites and Google may respond individually

Case Study Biography Online

Biography online is a new site, about 1 year old. I have spent a lot of time writing long biographies. It was gaining a decent traffic of about 600 people per day. Not a huge amount, but not bad for a 1 year site, it has a lot of potential for future.

On 27th June, all google rankings disappeared and to be honest it is hard to know why.

Possible reasons

1. Duplication.
   I have used some duplication from wikipedia , but this is only about 25%. If they reduced rankings of these pages it would make sense. But to reduce the rankings of the other 75% of pages as well doesn’t make sense.
2. Blog entries too short.
   It is true some of my blog entries are a little short. But, a lot of articles are very long e.g. “50 women who changed the world”
3. Too many links?
   The site does have a lot of inbound links. Many of these are generated from Ezine articles. I have also linked the site quite a bit from my own site richardpettinger.com Could this be a cause?
   However, the site has attracted a lot of natural (i.e. not by me) links
4. Affiliate programs?
   Yes I have google adsense and a bit of amazon, but I can’t see why this would be a problem. Also some pages have no advertising at all (e.g) , and they have lost ranking just the same.
5. Black Hat techniques?
   Don’t know what they are.
6. Recipricol linking strategies.
   I don’t participate in reciprocol linking strategies.

It is a mystery, maybe I got too many links, I don’t know. It is also quite difficult to know, because I have done very little to the site in the past 2 months.

I am hopeful Google will sort itself out relatively soon. I definitely won’t give up on the site because I’ve invested alot of time into it. It’s also getting quite decent traffic from MSN.

I will try adding more unique content and get more natural links, but for the moment patience is best hope.

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