A Position 6 Penalty?

By Jason Lee Miller - Tue, 01/29/2008 - 6:17pm.

Google Kama Sutra party foul proves real

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.

Though it sounded kind of silly that Google would invoke a four or five-place penalty (for what, a broken link and saying something mean about Sergey maybe?), the number of webmasters reporting the problem added a bit of an urban myth weight to it.

Search Engine Roundtable is reporting that Matt Cutts confirmed a glitch with Google, and that the database is in the process of resetting everything to normal.

There wasn't much explanation other than that. Guess even Google sometimes makes mistakes.

News Tags: Search, SEO, Google, Penalties

About the author:
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.

Comments

Submitted by Perfect Wealth Formula (WPN reader) on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 3:17pm.

Some relief

I too thought my campaigns took a turn for the worse with no explantion when I noticed a severe drop in many of my ads. Too bad I was paying the same price for a worse position and google, having now admitted the problem, still won't refund me any money even though they know I shouldn't have been paying the high click costs due to the drop. Oh well, that's Google for you.

Cheers,

Justin

Cruise To Cash

Submitted by Louis (WPN reader) on Sun, 02/03/2008 - 3:21pm.

Phew.

That is really good to know. I thought it was just me and went into SEO panic mode and started checking everything that I may have missed. Found it odd that it just happened out of the blue with nothing doing on my part.