Google Penalties
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008There is a Hot Debate going on over Google Penalties since long and everyone is confused about them.
Do they really exists ?
How to find if your website got a Google Penalty ?
There are many more questions often asked by webmasters !! Like this morning i saw a thread on Digital Point where a webmaster was worried that his website had gone to last page for his competitive keyword !!
So what exactly are Google Penalties ?
In February 2006 Matt Cutts confirmed about Google Penalties in his blog post Confirming a Penalty.
Later on April 26, 2006 Matt wrote another post Notifying Webmasters of Penalties.
If you don’t want to read the full post, the executive summary is that Google’s Webspam team is working with our Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site. In my world (webmasters), this is both a Big Deal and a Good Thing, even though it’s still an experiment. Sign up for Sitemaps to try it out. Oh, and the Sitemaps team introduced a bunch more new and helpful features too. Check out the Sitemaps Blog for more info.
So this is confirmed that Google gives penalties for websites involved in BlackHat Techniques.
Now the question is how many type of penalties are there ?
Many Myths about this exists as M not sure if any professional from Google ever confirmed about this in public that exactly how many penalties exists and for what reason they exists !! (I’m Still searching if i will get i will update about that).
However there are 3 Major penalties:
- -30 penalty
- -950 penalty
- Index Exclusion
Now lets discuss further about these penalties.
It is often reported that a -30 penalty affects whole domain (This includes YourWebsiteName) it is reported that the websites affected with this penalty usually get all its keywords pushed down to -30 ranks and can be seen on #31 Spot at 4th page. Whereas on the other hand -950 penalty only affects specific URL’s for some specific keywords only and push that keyword and page to -950 ranks down after getting this penalty you can see your website results on the last page.
According to Loren Baker at Searchenginejournal:
However, there has been a lot of debate on whether the drop of a website’s rank by 30 or 950 spots in Google is really a penalty for adopting shady SEO methods or is it just because some of the major ranking elements that were holding the ranks of a website high just got devalued in the Google algorithm update tossing the ranks badly.
There is a long discussion about -30 and -950 penalty can be seen on WebmasterWorld here.
Loren Baker wrote an interesting article about this can be seen here.
I’m not sure but there is one more penalty known as -6 Penalty, You can see the discussion over this on WebmasterWorld here. Aaron Wall had also wrote about this on his blog here.
Well if you have any experience with such penalty on your website let us know !! If you think that there are more penalties Google can give in addition to the one i mentioned feel free to leave a comment !! I will Update this post later when i will get more detail about the penalties.
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