Not long ago, another installment of the wacky car race known as the LeMons was held. Rule-breakers are penalized by being forced to do things like paint Bob Ross landscapes on their hoods and participate in conga lines. Google’s punishment system isn’t quite as obvious, though, so Matt Cutts discussed the matter at SMX Advanced.
Pick a number between 6 and 950 and you'll likely find evidence, or at least the antecedent number, for a Google ranking penalty. Webmasters and SEOers are in general agreement Google penalizes, and have dubbed them according to their numeric reprimand: -6, -30, -60, -950, and so on. Google inadvertently in cases has acknowledged such penalties exist, but has yet to present any hard and fast rules.
It could be said pretty fairly that webmasters and SEOers, if dropped a rank or two, automatically assume they've been penalized. A recent development, involving the "position 6" penalty, proved to be a reality.It's not clear why it was a reality, other than a Google glitch.Webmasters reported worries about sites that historically had ranked in the top two results for certain keywords had dropped to the sixth position. Dropping to below the top five, or below the fold (below where a person may have to scroll), could mean sudden death in the exposure game.
A couple of weeks ago, Heather Hopkins at Hitwise noted that the human-powered Mahalo search engine has been showing a very strong curve of increasing traffic:
There are two words that are guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any website proprietor: penalties and filters.
They damage rankings and ultimately may result in banishment from the search engines. However, before panic sets in, let us guide you through the basics of penalties and filters.
A penalty is caused by significant violations of a search engine's website guidelines, such as:
People who have believed downloading copyrighted content did not pose any kind of legal problem have faced plenty of legal troubles, but the real trouble comes as enforcement against illegal downloading makes people fear legal downloading.
Either the Google PageRank in your toolbar is officially meaningless, or Google just sent another message to link sellers. Once again, Google isn't talking and we're left to speculate.
Spam Wikipedia, and you will end up in one of the most dreaded places in the World Wide Web. Imagine a place where your site appears in the 'Spammer Blacklist' and Yahoo! And Google give you the cold shoulder.
The recent slap a handful of directories experienced was unaccompanied by an explanation from Google, though the general consensus (maybe) was that Google's webspam team was sending a message. Weeks later, WebProNews has wrangled a response from Google's Webmaster Central team – sort of.
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