*The following tip was shared by Eric Gesinski who does Oklahoma SEO*
If you’re serious about doing SEO, you need to make sure you follow the rules to stay in the good graces of the current primary search engine. Google has several guidelines on how sites should be constructed. Follow these to keep your SEO performing well. Ignore them at your own peril.
The main reason to follow Google’s major guidelines are to avoid a penalty by Google. Google has multiple levels of penalties, but they rank into 3 major levels:
- Google #6 Penalty (also called -5)
- Google -30 Penalty
- Google -950 Penalty
They are each caused by the following.
Google -5 Penalty
This is a fairly minor penalty. This particular penalty is not fully understood, but in many cases a listing gets dropped from #1 to #6. The common explanation for this penalty is by over-optimizing for a specific keyword. So if you have anchor text from off-site links using only one particular keyword phrase (and no variations), you can encounter this penalty.
Google -30 Penalty
This is a heavier penalty, set to websites that use gray-hat to minor black-hat SEO techniques (and get caught). If Google catches you doing any of these things, you’ll get dropped 30 positions. There are mixed reasons for this penalty, but include creating “doorway” pages (where a page is optimized for just the search engines but redirects to a different page for humans), filling blog comments with spammy comments, and other only moderately evil deeds.
Google -950 Penalty
This is the big one, where Google has caught you doing something very bad, very black-hat. By being penalized 950 pages, you are sent to the last page of the listings on Google. There is no set list by Google for what will cause this particular penalty, but major reasons are having pages that are malicious (such as with phishing schemes or installation of malware), or linking to such a site. If Google feels your pages are malicious enough (and not just linking to bad sites), you can get completely black-listed and be removed from the listings entirely.
In the case that Google penalizes you, if you correct your black-hat ways you can request reconsideration. If you do this, make sure to explicitly tell Google which issues you found and corrected, and then they may remove the penalty (if the corrections you made were to the issues that caused the penalty). There is no way (currently) to ask Google what caused your penalty, and they go through reconsideration requests at their own pace. You can only check the listings after some time (usually a week or two) to see if they have removed the penalty.
To make sure your SEO stays solid and you don’t experience penalties, a recommended approach is to check that your site abides by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
i’ve never seen the point values for penalties.. not going to pull a hagfish and say they don’t exist tho.
i’ve seen google remove specific pages for specific keywords and after finding out about the link wheel the client set up on his own.. then deleting it, the pages came back up to #1.
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I’m not discussing whether or not these penalties exist or have any basis to them, that’s an argument in itself. However, if you can find any of the top 3 ranking high competitive keyword searches (Gab Goldenberg has a great list that includes insurance and job search etc.. that’s on Michael Grays blog) that’s top 5 results don’t involve grey or blackhat, then you’ll blow me away. If you’re ranking for any highly competitive keywords, you’re violating a ton of guidelines including Link Buying (not developing). Every competitive keyword ranking has a level of dirt in there that helps it rank. Google knows it and they give space to it.
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Eric Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
They give space to it, but they will penalize at some point. Whether it’s because the site is just unlucky and got a manual check or because they just crossed some line for black-hat methods, I couldn’t say. I have to agree, though, finding a perfectly white-hat top 5 ranking is a bit rare.
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I am trying to be gentle here but this post is a load of… inaccuracies. This division is bogus, especially if you divide it by “the severity of transgression”. It doesn’t work that way, you can get all ranges of penalties for any kind of transgression, it is SERP dependent, keyword dependent and is definitely not this clear cut.
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Eric Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Position fluctuation is a natural result of all sorts of adjustments within the SERPs. However, clear cut penalties are not as common, and that’s what this article was targeting.
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Branko Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I was not talking fluctuations, I was talking penalties. Yes they exist and yes you have grossly oversimplified the way and the reason they happen.
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Eric Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Point taken, and I did simplify. If I wanted to write a fully detailed thorough explanation of every reason for these penalties, it would be closer to a book report than an article. This article was meant to be more of a summary, a base synopsis on penalties and their causes. I thought it would be worth bringing their existence up at all to make SEOs aware of them (these three penalties in particular) - that was my primary goal with this article. It may help individuals who suddenly see a listing drop from 1 to 6 or 30 full positions to know that there is a rational explanation for it.
Where the did you get -950 from eric? Source please
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Such a low quality article from Ann Smarty. Unbelievable. -5, -30, -950… does anyone take this levels serious?
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Ann Smarty Reply:
December 24th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Read the post and the comments before arriving at conclusions please
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I’m surprised so many people have never heard of these specific penalties. I’ll go ahead and give some references, so you can realize this is valid information.
The -5 penalty
The -30 penalty
The -950 penalty
These are sites you should recognize, and in the last case have comments by a certain individual named Matt Cutts. You can try looking these up before shouting shenanigans and realize these penalties do, in fact, exist.
Ann, if you’d like to put these reference links below the article, it may help.
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Eric Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Hmm - that last link I didn’t format correctly, it would appear. Here it is again:
The -950 penalty
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I’ve heard of the value points before, and those are some excellent references, Eric. Thank you! Has anyone seen any big cases like Matt Cutts recently?
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I don’t think Google places this much weight on offsite tactics.
What you’re telling me is if I want to rank for a specific keyword, all I have to do is look at the top 3 sites, and start spamming comments, creating link wheels, and these guys will drop?
Just as greyhat offsite techniques can game Google for positive results, Google can’t possibly be penalizing sites based on sites that are linking to them that they can’t possibly control.
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Eric Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Penalties are given for links from a site, never for links to a site. Spammy comments can sometimes cause penalties if they are left unchecked (and not removed) and link the site to malicious pages. Even though the site did not intentionally link to the malicious pages, it still is a concern - spammy comments were one of the motivations for the nofollow tag. If a site has a comment field, then spammy comments linking to malicious sites should not be accepted (or should be removed if they are).
Chances are if you begin spamming comments to a site that’s managed to reach the top 3, those comments won’t stick. And I don’t know this for sure - but if comments that link to a bad site (containing malware, for example) are not removed from the site, then yes, they will get a penalty to prevent people seeing them in high position and visiting from becoming infected.
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The -950 penalty
Thank you for the clarification!
My vapourware sense was going off, keeps me alive.
Ahhhh..his holiness Matt Cutts (Hallejua!!!) , well can’t get anymore official than that.. I was thinking maybe we should get some Sodium Pentathol, A college frat party & drunk Matt Cutts, and a farm animal and carefully extricate intel material.
Does anyone understand goat?.
Searchengineman
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wow..! Didn’t really new that..!!..Thanks for the great share..! actually i wasn’t clear abut the penalties at all..!
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Howdy Ann,
Unlike others, I truly appreciate your post! I am a beginner SEO & the information you have provided helps me to diagnose why my site has been filtered from serps (not yet penalized!!).
My site was doing well until late november and but this december suddenly lost all rankings on google serps. I have been constantly trying to assess what possibly could i have done wrong to get kicked from google.
For all the big time seo guys, this post might not hold much value for them but for someone like me its definitely valuable.
Thanks for all the great posts. I am a big fan of your work.
God Bless
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I know if i doesn’t follow the webmaster guide lines, Google will posses some penalties, but i dont know what are the penalties, thanks for listing the penalties.
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I never knew these types of penalties existed but I will bookmark this post so I can go back for reference and read up on them in more detail. Thanks for sharing.
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I understand that Google does penalize sites for playing unfair, but I’m also curious as to where these specific numbers about SERP droppings originated. I have never heard of this, unless someone has cracked the algorythm.
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Thanks Ann for the post. I have been scouring blogs trying to figure what happened to my site this week. Three days ago my site disappeared from the serps for everything except my domain name. Today it came back. I do not know if it is coincidence but when it was down I noticed in webmaster tools home page there was a small gray world icon next to my site name. This morning my site started showing up in the serps again the gray world was gone. Now it is back again but so far I am still in the serps but I am paranoid. I tried to follow Googles guidelines when building my pages so I have been stunned to get slapped so hard for something I am not even aware of. I wonder if anyone knows what the icon means.
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