Websites that are ranking well can suddenly find that certain pages, or even the entire website now are listed on the very last page of google results - they have become one of many hit by the google 950 penalty.
What is the google 950 penalty? A website or page suddenly drops to the last page of google results, a loss of approximately 950 places, hence the term "950 penalty"
Does the penalty actually exist? Absolutely yes. A website does not drop to the last page because it has suddenly become less important or relevant than all the websites that havent dropped. It drops to the last page because it has been penalized.
Why is the penalty applied to a website? Google isnt saying anything, so nobody knows for sure. Our guess would be that the most likely explanation is that the website does not follow the google webmaster guidelines, or has triggered some kind of spam filter. But we can only guess at this stage.
Is the penalty manually given or automatically given? Again, we can only guess, but it is likely that it is automatic - some factor or combination of factors has triggered an automatic process that flags the website, and it is dropped to the last page of search results. There may be some sites that are flagged manually, but the reason why we believe it is an automatic, or mostly automatic process is the large scale involved. There are simply too many websites involved to manually flag them all.
How can a website solve the google 950 penalty? Rumour has it that there is an undocumented META tag that tells google not to apply any 950 penalty:
<meta name=”robots” content=”no950penalty”> .... but of course this is not true!
We were recently asked to help a website affected by the google 950 penalty, and we were successful in solving their problem. How did we do it? Does our solution apply to any website affected?
- First of all we fixed their w3c validation errors, and cleaned their very messy html. This may not have been what solved the problem, but is helpful in any case.
- Then we fixed their duplicate content problem, using the techniques described in the blog post remove duplicated DotNetNuke content to improve your page rank, and this probably did contribute to solving the problem.
- Then we also got them a few more good quality unpaid links from good quality sites. This also probably contributed to solving their problem.
Our client was freed from the google 950 penalty in around one week - was it due to our efforts, or just another random Google reordering? We obviously would like to think that it was due to our efforts, but can not prove it conclusively. The steps we took appeared to work in this case, but may or may not be useful for every website that has been penalized.
Google is a black box that gives no insight into its inner workings, and these penalties may be due to any number of factors. It is unlikely then that there is going to be a specific recipe for removing the penalty.