Google ranking position penalties

Hey everyone

I'm fully aware you can get penalsied by google for over optimisation and buying/selling links but how can you tell this?

I had a site go from page 2 to EXACTLY 201 for the phrase I was optimising for. Another site went from page 1 to EXACTLY 601.

It seems to be no coincidence that they are just outside a major multiple of 100 places. Anyone know anything about this?

 

Yep that sure sounds like a penalty. I haven't experienced the +200 or +600 penalties myself. You must've really done something bad. I've only had to deal with +30 and +60 penalties.

I don't think there is really a way to prove that you're penalized, but it is pretty obvious. You can try contacting Google and they might respond with some reasoning, but it could take a while.

 

Or better yet, clean up the site, remove the paid links (or nofollow them), and read their starter guide to see if you meet all the criteria (and avoid the pitfalls), then file a reinclusion request and state that you fixed the problems that violated their TOS.

 

in what sense one can define over optimization, so we can take care for that

 

That's easy. If it looks like rubbish (in other words even you can't read it clearly), chances are it probably is.

 

You must have done something to trigger a filter at Google. You will have to scrutinize things you have done recently and then that should give you a clue.

I believe you are talking about 2 different website or do both of these ranking drops relate to one website?

 

2 different site. Beleive me neither of them are in any way spammy and are both in legitimate industries. One sells wedding gifts, the other is in the home industry

 

Happened similar stuff to my sites: from #1 to 5th pages - all of them for all keywords Respected and trusted sites, no outside links, no spamming, no keyword stuffing, nothing.

Did this happened last October?

 

Did you over back linked them, did you linked them from non related low PR sites , did you have more than 20 back links a day , if yes than you can be easily detected by G and get penalties ...

 

No way.

Otherwise everybody will be destroying competition placing link for them...

 

Did you try to destroy any site that way, I bet we can do it but it cost money and time, as destoring site that has PR6 and downgrading to PR5 is very hard work , but going from PR2 to PR1 is very easy .
Look it this way:
PR6 site has 50000 backlinks from varius sites and various anchor text.
if you want to downgrade it to PR5 you will need lot of backlinks with exact same keyword from eg porn sites.
We can continue to argue, but lets make experiment here in DP , pick some site and try to downgrade it this way. Though picking a site may be hardest job as we will need stats from that site and somebody willing to destroy it

 

No way 10k links pointing to a site won't hurt him nor help him, unless they are natural flowing links , different anchor text, slowly built... etc etc.

The only way to fu$# a site is to place links on it pointing to bad neighbors - not the other way around.

 

No over backlinks but over optimized and bad neighborhood cause penalties.

 

I have similar experience.For certain keywords big G penalized me for 7 pages.(2 page to 9 page).

 

Why would you get penalized?

 

I also happened with me. but not everything fine.
I hope you will soon get your original ranking

 

well this only happens when there is something wrong in your pages rest is ok. Over optimization for offpage will never create any problem but definitely if over optimization is done onpage will fall you down. So better go with google webmaster guidelines as mention in google webmaster blog.

 

Just to be clear - you had a page from one site move from a position on page 2 (i.e. somewhere between position 11-20) to position 201. And you had a page on another site move from a position on page 1 (position between 1-10) to position 601. (this assumes the default 10 results per page).

If you believe a +x penalty was applied, then in the first case it would mean you saw something between +181 and +190, and in the second case something between +591 and +600.

Unless you were initially in position 1 in the second case (were you?), these can't be seen as +x penalties in multiples of 100. To me, it wouldn't make much sense for the FINAL position to be related to a multiple of 100. Some believe penalties exist in multiples of 10s or 100s (+30, +90, +300...) but your case doesn't seem to fit this - the numbers don't match.

Personally, I believe it's easy to see patterns where none exist. You've obviously seen a drop in rankings, but they may not even be permanent. How will they change over the next few weeks? And I think it's extremely unlikely for penalties to exist that actually specify a drop of a specific number of places. Drops in rankings most likely occur for all sorts of number of places, but when the drop is 20, or 50, or 100 people think the number is significant - but when it's 22 or 31 or 98 they don't pay as much attention.

Howard

 

Yes, I think all are facing the same problem. Its obvious the all sites are not getting penalized.
May be Google is updating some thing.

 

Thanks howard I understand what you are getting at but I would have thought google may have a similar algortyth saying some thing like "don't let this site into the top 200" etc in a similar way to having one that says "drop this site exactly 200 places"?