Ok how is this for a theory on why Google has recently been hitting seemingly good white hat sites with the 950 penalty and bumping sites right to the bottom of the SERPS without actually delisting them. I have to sites, site A and site B. Both sites have been ranking in top 10 (top 15 at most) results for the main targeted keywords. Site A used to have Google Adwords campaign but it was then switched to Site B with a small budget campaign running on it. Suddenly, for no apparant reason Site A is bumped to the very bottom of the SERPS for all keywords it ranked for, we are talking a movemement of around 9,950 places down! I decided to sit back and wait to see if it re-appeared. After 2 weeks there was no sign of it so to get some traffic I switched the Google Adwords campaign from site B to site A. Within a few days site A moves back up to its previous top 10 positions on the main keywords, in other words the 950 penalty was removed. Site B therefore, no longer has an Adwords campaign running and less than a month later, site B suddenly gets hit by the same 950 penalty. Bad times. Again I decide to wait a little while and see what happens. After almost 3 weeks there is still no sign of it re-emerging and so I switch the Adwords campaign from site A back to site B. Literally within 2 days site B is back listing highly in the SERPs. Now this could just be a coincidence, after all I gave both sites around the same amount of time to be relisted and my PPC budget is too low to have any impact on Google. However, isn't it strange that twice this has happened? The site with no Adwords gets 950 penalty and then within days of turning Adwords back on the site re-appears. Ok could just be coincidence and there could be other factors at work here but it's still odd. Has anyone else ever seen this happen to their sites?
I've been saying this for months, even on google webmaster group, and everyone has been calling me crazy. Google has made all these penalties because they need to sell advertising, this is their business. They can't have everyone doing only organic serps because each time someone clicks on an organic listing they are losing money, unless the user ends up clicking on an adsense ad on the organic listings result page.
InvestWise - I have had the exact same problem recently. My site was ranking very well for many keywords. I have made many changes to site but one of them was to stop my google adwords campaign. It has been over a week and i am nowhere to be found. I am still indexed and crawled very regularly. I am going to put adwords back on today. My site is earlyvegas.com PR 6 - est. 2001 I will keep this thread informed of any changes. If my site drops goes back up or stays the same.
I saw nothing for about 6 months after I dropped Adwords from site A. Maybe dropping it doesn't have a big impact but once you are hit with the 950 and you are not doing Adwords, try putting it on. Glad it's not just me who thinks this could actually happen even if it seems unlikely...
I'm open minded to all conspiracy theories I do think something fishy is going on with Analytics... so I wouldn't discount any possibility of this happening with AdWords.
These penalties are cryptic. As I understand it, they penalize you using the Google -30, Google -300, Google -950 etc. Then after a period of time they remove the penalty and you are supposed to correct the the site. Should you not make the changes, they reapply the penalty. There is no notification. You are just supposed to figure it out. I don't understand the logic of removing the penalty and then reapplying it when you have made no changes.
When I was big into arbitrage (20K a month or more spent in adwords), I noticed that my adwords campaigns were counted as back links in google's serps as well as yahoo, etc. I had tens of thousands of links from sites that my ad appeared on.
Maybe that could be the reason, maybe it couldnt... Whatever the case we all know there is only a group of people that know... And that is the people at G mckST
I'm not drawing any conclusions. I know most people say adwords ads don't count as back links, but my experience has shown otherwise.
It's funny that you mentioned this. I noticed this for my site as well...DOZENS of search results pages and backlinks, just from sites that ran my AdWords ad. That's a pretty interesting error that Google probably caught on to.
It would be very interesting to see if this experiment scales to a larger test group. The theory is valid: Google makes it's money selling targeted traffic, they don't make money giving it away for free. Why would an advertiser pay for an ad if they could rank for free in the natural results? Therefore, it makes good economic sense for google to prevent their advertisers from ranking in natural results. I'm advertising a site right now wih adwords, but I would pull the plug if my site appeared naturally for the same keywords. Google certainly doesn't want that to happen. I'd love to see Google get caught red-handed on this one.
Try copying & pasting your exact AdWords text (the middle part) in google and within quotes, and see how many sites show up with that exact result. That's how I found out!
This does seem possible but It might just be coincidence...However just look through some of the SERPS and you will see in some niches outdated as hell info my feeling is that put outdated worthless info close to the top in some not all niches to get people to click on ads...Just my feelings. But for the most part I don't seem to think they would do this or atleast I should say I hope they wouldn't do this. But hey if your getting free results and not paying then they might see it as you better start paying.
Ok if you look above I am doing a small uncontrolled expirement. I added Adwords yesterday and last night I started coming out of the the -950 penalty for some keywords. I'm not sure if it is related but may have helped. All I know is I am going to ad some more Adwords and hopefully get back to the rankings I used to have.