Google's 950 Penalty
 

Does anyone here know if google actually has a 950 penalty and, if so, do you know of a tool to check to see if your site has been penalized with it? Also, same question regarding the 30 penalty?

I don't really believe in it.

Notwithstanding the fact that I've got pages suffering from it, ha ha.

Never heard of a tool to test for it.

Greenie is a believer :)
This tip and trick was given to me in January
http://www.greenguysboard.com/newsle...letter387.html

Another bullshit theory...

Unproven... unprovable... and another waste so time..


DD

Just avoid triggering the MSSA (My Site Sucks Ass and Google Just Found Out) penalty.

Thanks Jim.

Googles "No Brain" Penalty
by DangerDave


Webmasters have discovered a new Google filter that Google uses to downrank web sites in its result pages. Has this filter been applied to your web site? How can you avoid that Google applies that filter to your site?

What is Google's No Brain filter?
The No Brain filter is a penalty that Google applies to web sites that are run by webmasters with no brains. If Google applies the penalty to a web site, the rankings of that site are downgraded by 9875.354 positions.

Many webmasters reported that they had top rankings on Google and now they cannot get beyond position -485.12 in Google. Some webmasters even have #5854.54 rankings for all of their keywords on Google.

Why does Google apply the No Brain filter to some web sites?
It seems that Google applies the No Brain filter to web sites whose webmasters hang out on WebmasterWorld too much talking about bullshit theories that can never be proven or unproven. It seems that following the current theory-of-the-month triggers the No Brain filter on Google:


-30 penalty
If the webmasters age is below thirty google penalises the site for being run by an immature nincompoop.

-950 penalty
If a site was ranked at any number and is now ranked at any other lower number then webmasters can say that this penalty has been applied without showing any reason, argument, proof or supprt.

Standing on left leg penalty
If the webmaster of a site in the northern hemisphere stands on one leg and then falls to the right , then this penalty is applied. Of course the opposite is true for webmasters in the southern hemisphere.(Though this could change due to global wamring.)

Pull a rabbit out of my arse penalty
If a webmaster(wether standing on one leg or two) can pull a rabbit out of their arse, and the rabbit comes out clean, then no penalty applies. If the rabbit comes out stained, skidmarked or suffocated, the webmaster and their site suffers the RSPCA penalty.( also known as the dog penalty) In this case Google delivers savage dogs via UPS to the webmasters home and they are torn limb from limb.(Webmasters must also pay the return postage for the savage dogs)


First of all, you should remove the spam elements from your web site - because if you don't you are a fucking spammer and you will die a horrible death. If you use JavaScript redirects or doorway pages, then you are a redirecting lame-arse spammer and you deserve everything you get

The NO Brain filter seems to be an automated filter. If you remove the spam factors from your site then you'll probably turn your site into something that may actually be of value to the surfer and therefore you may get your rankings back after some time. You can also send a I am a spamming cunt and I want to be forgiven request to Google.

If nothing helps, then the only way to get reincluded in Google is to stand on one leg, pull a rabbit out of your arse, face mecca, and state three times in a lound voice "George Bush is the smartest man in the world"(or you could just get a new domain name to start spamming with)

Google doesn't like spammers. If you want lasting results then you should focus on NOT BEING A FUCKING SPAMMER!




Jim, you could include this in the next newletter, as it contains the same amount of factual information as this article did..


DD

Dave, it's easy to say that kind of thing (and the "Pulling Rabbit From Arse" penalty is pretty funny), but pretty much by definition 98% of adult sites are spammy.

I don't doubt that most adult sites, with their reliance of reciprocal linking, inherently heavy keyword loading, and multiple pages any one of which is inherently indistinguisable from so-called doorway pages, are likely to get some kind of knocked-back penalty applied automatically by the algos.

To say the knock-back is 30 positions or 950 positions is probably bullshit - to think that there's a knockback probably has some truth to it.

But, ultimately, we are still left with the problem that adult sites are inherently spammy - they exist to acheive a commercial goal, not to provide commercial free information, which is what google prefers and rewards.

Yeah but if you got no brains you wouldn't even know you're spamming.

Personally I'm just trying to get this fucking rabbit unstuck from my arse.

Dame, i gotta wait 21/2 years to get better results :(

Here's the thing.

Since January one of my sites has been consistently listed on the very last page of results for one particular search term. Previously this site was in the top 10 for that term.

I've been going through my site, trying to make sure there are no spammy elements to it, and I'm fairly certain it's clean. It was pretty clean to begin with.

Still, there I am, stuck on page 9 (and sometimes booted off into the omitted results). It doesn't matter what I do, I'm still there. It's maddening.

What's more, I'm in the company of several other well known GG&J webmasters, people who I know aren't spammers. Greenie's site was there with me for a while.

This thread http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3215939.htm (yes, it's at Webmaster world, bear with me) shows a lot of other sites who have had the same thing happen, and they're not spammy sites.

Google gives no clue as to why this might have happened. I've done a bit of reading and I'm still in the dark.

I think I'm going to have to try a reinclusion request.

I guess this post is just a whinge on my part. I do my best to make clean, non-spammy sites that users will like, just like Google says we should. And then shit like this happens and I'm left wondering what the hell I did wrong. It's very, very frustrating.

Well, a reinclusion request definitely won't help.

From everything you've said, you are clearly already included in the database.

Otherwise, it sounds pretty classic. A lot of people have experienced what you are experiencing.

As for what you can do about it, well, that's just not easy to say with any certainty.

I'm sure we would all have our theories about what to do, but there's no guarantee any of them would work.

I'm pretty sure that the penalty is real. Whether you call it a 950 penalty or something else, it's pretty easy to check for. To do that, follow these steps:
1) go to http://google.com
2) click on "Advanced Search" ... this is to the right in small text
3) type in the search term (the keyword phrase that you're targetting) in the first field of the "Find Results" area that says "with all of the words"
4) change the "drop down" to the right to "100 results"
5) click the button labeled "Google Search"
6) scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the #10
7) click on the link that says "repeat the search with the omitted results included." ...note, you should really do everything without this step first and then do it if you don't find your site/page
8) use your web browser's "find" or "find in this page" capability to search for your domain name
9) if you're not on page 10 then go to page 9, etc until you find your domain

I've heard from folks that it's not too difficult to get your site (so far the penalty appears to just be a page by page penalty as opposed to penalizing a whole website) unpenalized for this particular penalty. I'm hoping that folks won't turn this into a lynch mob and see other familiar sites with this penalty and immediately assume they're a "bad neighborhood."

One of the things that I'm guilty of, and have some pages that have gotten penalized for, is hyperlinking in link trades to too many different sites using the same keyword phrase on the same page...ie linking to too many sites from my amateur page using the phrase "amateur sex" to link to each one. To fix this, I'm just changing the anchor text in the links to differentiate each one a bit.

What other thoughts do ya'll have regarding this?

I don't know if there's a 950 penalty or a rectal rabbit penalty, but there's definitely something going on. Google applied for a patent in December of '06 for a "phrase based information retrieval system". While this new system appears to have some storage savings and document retrieval speed benefits, the main focus appears to be on identifying spam documents, keyword stuffing and the like.

Here's the patent application:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...DN/20060294155

Here it is in plain english:

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=413

Dave, I'm just not sure if you don't believe in a spam penalty or if you just don't like what people call it.

You don't need a stamp of approval from Dave - he doesn't work at Google and neither do I, so what do we know? Just because the problem isn't impacting any of our sites doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. I wouldn't assume it exists, either.

Let's talk facts - opinions on whether a penalty is real or myth don't solve problems.

Your site doesn't have to be spamming to show up in the last page of results. Grandmascrotum's site is far from spammy but it nevertheless ranks 900+ for several related terms.

All I can suggest at this point is to get rid of any negative signals - cleaning up questionable outbound links (e.g. linktrades with low-quality hubs), nofollowing aff links, reducing duplicate content, fixing 404s, eliminating canonical issues, reducing keyword frequency, etc.

Filing a re-inclusion request, after all that's done, is an option. You are allowed to file one not only when a site is banned but also when a site is penalized. Whether you're just ranked poorly or penalized is up to you to decide.

The best cure for any site IMO is to gain links from authoritative sites with your target keywords in anchor text as part of an article - that's more powerful than blogroll links, thousands of cheap recips, etc, but in adult, as we all know, "quality links" are hard to come by.

You really think filing a reinclusion request could help in a case like this?

I think it's more likely to cause harm than good.

And I don't see how it can cause a good result with an adult site, which is, as I've said, basically a commercial platform.

I tend to think you are applying a mainstream hope to the adult site arena, and that as soon as a google worker sees that reinclusion request for an adult site like ours, he's going to either ignore it completely, or assume that a reinclusion request wouldn't be filed unless there was something sneaky going on, and start looking for something to penalize the site for.

Do you have some reason to believe a reinclusion can help an adult site that hasn't previously been banned?

---

Having too many links with identical anchor text has been a known risk for two years or so now, it's one of the things we do have a bot of control over, and one of the things that can be worked on.

The phrase thing - which is basically the newest term for keyword stuffing - has probably been affecting adult sites for months now. It's not easy to create a large adult site without putting too many related phrases on any given page - that's the nature of describing porn that's for sale, and putting any more than a few links on any given page. You are going to end up with "too many" related phrases on the page.

Bill, saying re-inclusion is an option for penalized sites is not the same as saying I recommend filing a re-inclusion request.

Many adult sites, including some I own, are low value, disposable surfer-traps. But Ms. Naughty's blog? I see no reason not to file a reinclusion request for a quality sex blog if her blog is really penalized.

Unless you're guilty of spammy tactics, there's nothing to worry about.

I've emailed Adam Lasnik asking him to take a look at one of my sites. He emailed me back, saying there's no penalty applied.

You think Adam doesn't occasionally surf porn? Even Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Spam Team, regards Link O Rama, Persian Kitty, and The Hun as "quality porn sites." Not all adult sites offer value - but that goes without saying for any niche, adult or mainstream.

As for adult VS mainstream, here's a quote on Threadwatch by Mr. Turner (whoever he is) in response to Matt Cutts admitting Google cannot tell the difference between a quality porn site and porn spam:

Here's an unfounded theory for thought:

If Google is using a variation of the TrustRank algorithm, then Google cannot tell the difference between low PageRank quality pages and low PageRank spam. Because most links on adult sites are devalued due to lack of trust, average TBPR in adult compared to mainstream is low. Specifically, I don't know any adult sites with a TBPR 9. Even if low TBPR has no impact on rankings, it means that you'll see more spam on adult SERPS than in mainstream. It also means adult sites have a bigger tendency to lose rankings or go supplemental.

Anyone know if NASA are hiring?
I was thinking about applying as a trainee rocket scientist.
I think that's the only way i'd be able to understand search engine logic.

They say things like hidden text etc are banned by search engines but i can find several sites packed with the stuff in the top 10 links after a search on google.

Slightly interesting...

In a thread about google webmaster relations, Matt Cutts referenced the "950 penalty" and said:

annej, regarding the -950 thing, I'd watch this video I made: http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...71648913#1m42s
Starting around 1:42 into the video is where I talk about this.

----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013473.html

"Matt Cutts of Google Comments on "-950 Penalty" as "Over Optimization Penalty""

http://groups.google.com/group/Googl...3f856edc10ec4/

"The points I got out of it.
...
-overly seo'd sites
-don't listen to what SEO forums say
-don't optimize quite as much

Which seo methods are the trigger? Link exchanges, Keyword density,
Header usage, interlinking, pagerank hoarding, nofollow abuse, uniform
anchor text, common link schemes? I don't know.

But he does concentrate on "on your site" so I'd think the answer is
still on the site, perhaps an examination between an SEO'd site and
one that is ranking but obviously put together without SEO in mind
would be good (gov or edu sites for example) "
------------------------------------------------------

Nothing dramatically new, but I thought it was interesting that Cutts used the 950 term, and mentions "overoptimization" as being the cause.

I saw that video a while ago Bill. That was kind of the point I was getting to about believing or not. If you take what he says about Google practices as gospel, you have to believe there is a penalty.

When you're hit with any kind of penalty, I think the obvious course of action is to clean house. The problem is adult webmasters' sense of a "clean house", in general, is way dirtier than what Google considers clean.

For example, link list owners try to boost their ranking with identical anchor text on recip links. When you have thousands of recips with identical anchor text you have a problem. More you have them, more they're likely devalued. Then add the fact that those recip links are reciprocated and you have a bigger problem. New link list owners try to compete by accepting more and more free sites, but more links doesn't mean higher ranking. In fact, more links may lead to greater link devaluation.

I don't necessarily take Matt's word as gospel, but I believe he is honest. And since his main responsibility is fighting spam, he's the man when it comes to ranking penalties.

The "950 penalty" thing has been making me into a craven beast, and I'd just about given up on trying to fix it since nothing has worked.

Interesting that Matt Cutts would say overoptimisation was the trigger, since I believe my site wasn't really optimised when it got the boot. I've since worked hard on trying to clean it up to Google standards, as Halfdeck says, but it's made no difference.

Still, this might inspire me to keep trying.

If recip linking with uniform anchor text is a problem, it's pretty fucking hard to fix, because you can't really ask people to change links all over the place.

At this point in time I hate Google with a passion and long for Microsoft and Yahoo to somehow kill it. LOL

If you're penalized, I think you really have no choice but to submit a reinclusion request. Even if your site is clean, once your site is penalized, according to this quote, the penalty will not go away automatically. Someone inside Google has to flick a switch.

Wow, that is a pretty interesting quote.

Matt has said that. If you have a penalty, you should do a reinclusion request.

Now, the big question is, if you have a penalty on just some of your pages (i.e. not your whole site) should you do a reinclusion request? If so, do you make the request for each page that's down, or the site as a whole? I've seen alot of sites that we're all familiar with, where some of their pages are #1 for certain terms, but alot of other pages are buried (950 penalty) for other terms. There are pages that are buried for the keyword phrases that they target, yet show up as #1, or top 10, for other phrases.

That said, I don't know how the reinclusion request works...never done it. Just wondering if you can request it for a page, or must it be for the whole site?

How can you tell if you've been penalised?

1) go to http://google.com
2) click on "Advanced Search" ... this is to the right in small text
3) type in the search term (the keyword phrase that you're targetting) in the first field of the "Find Results" area that says "with all of the words"
4) change the "drop down" to the right to "100 results"
5) click the button labeled "Google Search"
6) scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the #10
7) click on the link that says "repeat the search with the omitted results included." ...note, you should really do everything without this step first and then do it if you don't find your site/page
8) use your web browser's "find" or "find in this page" capability to search for your domain name
9) if you're not on page 10 then go to page 9, etc until you find your domain

To add more confusion to the mix, I've seen what looks like an obvious penalty for a keyword and yet that same page can be in the top 10 for a different keyword or keyphrase. |loony|

Same here.

I've got pages that support that view.

However, I felt one couldn't be certain that the "penalty" referred to in that part of what cutts said to be directly tied to the so-called 950.

The links descbribed at the bottom were part of a moderately well known link trading "co-op" - which is substantially worse in googles eyes than a more simple type of "over-optimization" - it's clear participation in a linking scheme to game google.

But, I agree, that was an interesting statement, with implications for the reinclusion request.

I'm just not sure it's directly applicable to the problems adult sites are having.

However, someone should test it, and see what happens.

If you are being penalized, could a reinclusion request really hurt? I was told that if you are listed at all, you don't really want to bring attention to yourself.

I have been having the thought that there are some LL that are in a group sort of like that co-op. They all pretty much interlink. That is why I thought some sites were penalized. It is what I was trying to convey in that *other* thread. Not that my site was special, but that I wanted to get out of "the group" to see if it helped me with Google.

We have numerous instances of that. On some pages, we're buried for the target keyword phrase (this is the anchor text of all the incoming links) but we place #1 for slight variations of that phrase. We have a theory that google will flag a page for a certain keyword phrase...say if you have 75 links at the bottom of your amateur page with most using the words "amateur sex" to link to your link exchange partners. Google will flag you so that you can not show up well for "amateur sex" but for "sex amateur" you're fine, or something such.

If this is the case, will just changing the anchor text of your link exchanges away from the phrase "amateur sex" be enough, or did google already identify all 75+ sites (because most of those sites also trade every category page with each other) as some sort of link farm and you will never place well until you remove those links, and submit a reinclusion request?

And getting out of "the group" is certainly a valid and interesting experiment.

But, I'm definitely not sure that "the group" and the kind of co-op linking Cutts described would be seen as similar by google.

The reason I think that, is that there is a natural tendency for sites devoted to the same subjects to link to each other. This doesn't make them a linking scheme to game google. (altho, as we all know, adult sites come damn close to doing this, especially, ESPECIALLY, with the tendency to link based on PR)

Note the anchors of the links in the site cutts mentioned:

"Online Loan | Santa Cruz Hotels | Xbox Mod Chip | Home Loan | Mobile Phones " or "Bad Credit Mortgages | Afvallen | Problem Remortgage | Mortgage | Myspace Layouts".

This is radically different from what adult sites do.

I do happen to have some big concerns about the way adult sites handle:

1. uniform anchor text
2. links at the bottoms of pages
3. not giving one way links to each other
4. and still this, IMNSHO, idiotic obsession with PR, as evidenced by all the crazy people posting links about how they want "PR4+ links", without ever once mentioning the damn niche and relevance of the links.

We are testing these things in a few different ways and hopefully will have some positive results from at least one of our tests over the next few months.