Is there a -50 penalty with Google? My SERPs dropped badly...

I've heard about the -30 penalty and the nasty -950 penalty, but is there a -50 penalty? A week ago I ranked about #30 for a competitive keyword. Last Thursday, I was still about #30, but after the weekend, I'm ranking between #82 and #88. What could cause this drop? (FYI, I didn't drop in the SERPs for any of the keywords I rank highly for).

If you want more details about the actual keyword and what not, read my blog (on the bottom line in my siggy).

 

Yes there is. Some of my friends sites are penalized -50.

 

So what causes it?

 

I'm not sure about the cause. We are figuring it out. Some suggested that it may be the combination of duplicate contents, TLA code, PPP Code, sidebar links.

 

how do you determine if you've been penalized?

 

If you have a -50 penalty it will be across all your rankings and not just one search term.

 

I don't know if I've actually been penalized, but my ranking was going up 3-5 spots per week over the last 24 weeks, and dropped by about 50 spots literally overnight. A logical guess would be some sort of Google penalty, but I don't really know.

You'd think that a full Google penalty would have affected all my keyword's SERPs, but it was only for the one. I have several others where I'm ranking #1 to #5, and those haven't changed.

 

Then its not a -50 penalty.

There are a lot of reasons a site can drop. Some reasons are link devaluation and over-optimization penalties.

Do you have a lot of directory links? Some links from directories were devalued last week.

 

here's how you determine. If you have a website with your domain e.g. domain(dot)com. when you search the word "domain" in google, your homepage is on pages 5 or 6. A great example is johnchow(dot)com. search "johnchow" and the homepage www(dot)johnchow(dot)com is nowhere to be found in the first 5 pages. It is found in in 5 page.

 

I do have a lot of links from directories, but they all use Anchor Tag text for my other keywords that are still ranking high. The competitive keyword that I've been focusing on, I only have quality backlinks, at least 75% of which are at least partially relevant.

 

When I do that, I'm ranked #1. So maybe I'm not penalized?

So why the heck the huge drop in SERPs literally overnight for just the single keyword?

 

Its possible that some of the links were devalued or some paid links are no longer flowing pr.

 

That's the realization I'm coming to. I'm going to be watching the next backlink update in my webmaster tools very closely.

 

Try some searches on the mcdar tool on the various data centers

http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php

 

That is very odd. Searching using that tool, I'm not even in the top 100 on any datacenter, running from any of the Class C IPs. But, I did a search for the keyword on Google and I showed up as #70 in the actual results.

Then, I used some other tools out there and their results were anywhere from #80 to -100 (worse than 100).

Weird...

 

You will have to see how it plays out. I've seen the results propagate
from the mcdar dcs so you may be slowly dropping on that keyword.

 

That's most probably the reason. Google is coming down hard on paid links.

 

The loss of one good paid link can tank you.

 

I have over 40,000 backlinks to my site in the webmaster tools, many of them unpaid, natural links - over 1,000 of the BLs are deep links. I also have a lot of links from many PR 5 and 6 sites. I'm not using the "buy a PR7 link to jump up to PR6" strategy. I'm worried more about my SERPs, and it's been a pretty careful SEO campaign.

I'm thinking that a LOT of links have been devalued for that keyword because of the crackdown on paid links.

 

It could be collateral damage. You will have to see what happens in the next algo update.