Google's 950 Penalty

[Halfdeck]

My understanding is that if you tag a link with "nofollow" then it will not improve search engine ranking. Is that not the general consensus?

Nofollow is a way to shield you from penalties. Google does not need them to detect artificial links.

You can also use nofollow to tweak PageRank flow through internal links. By spreading out PageRank to a targeted set of pages, you exert some influence over which pages Google includes in the main index.

I was thinking of this site: "www.sexforwomen.net"

1) Competition increases over time. If a site doesn't continue to gain inbound links, it will eventually be outranked.

2) A gradual loss of ranking is different from a sudden drop in ranking.

3) The site is 108 pages big, but I only see 8 pages in the main index. The reason is simply that you don't have many strong IBL to the domain. (e.g. "http://d.sankey.ca/blog/322/there-is-a-tv")

4) I agree the on-page text is over-optimized ("Sex for Women, orgasms, clit pumps, g spots, female ejaculation, anal sex, vibrators, adult videos, better sex, centrefolds")

Where have you folks derived this theory, which you have repeated a number of times, that being part of a network is the source of the problems?

Bill, no one is claiming that being part of a network is why people get smacked over the head with the 950 penalty. I'm not even claiming that the penalty exists. All I'm saying is that being part of a network makes artificial links much easier for Google to detect. And considering the fact that linking violations incur the harshest penalties, its something worth keeping in mind.

I understand you guys think it's a penalty, but I don't think you can claim that just because you are suddenly dropped in the serps

Rankings shift daily across various DCs. That shift might be due to several factors, including 1) a dramatic algo upgrade, 2) data refresh, 3) PageRank shift, 4) increase in competition, or 5) a penalty.

When a site that was ranking #1 for "free porn" suddenly plummets to 870th, you can rule out 4 because 870 urls aren't going to suddenly outrank you over night. You can rule out 2 because data refreshes usually will not lead to a loss of 870 positions. A PageRank shift (3) that knocks thousands of pages into the supplemental index is a possibility, but if your site has at least TBPR 5, you should not see huge fluctuations in the number of pages in the main index. As for #1, these days I don't expect Google to unleash monumental algo upgrades; its more likely that Googlers tweak their algo on different DCs so that you see slightly different results on different datacenters.

I'm not claiming that msnaughty.com, for example, is penalized, but I think the chances of it not being penalized is close to nil.

If ALL clusters of sites (for example grandma scrotums modest little personal network) are now networks that google penalizes, how could one ever escape networks?

It's ok to link into a network as long as the link is editorial. And it's also ok to get a link from a site belonging to a network as long as the link is editorial.

Yeah, I know, the problem with us is that its unnatural to link to our competition, and everybody is our competition. But blogs are changing all that.

If some networks are worse than others, how could you possibly tell which network is good and which one is bad?

Relevance and signals of quality. If everybody linked to sites they liked, there would be no bad neighborhoods. One thing to keep in mind is that adult webmasters aren't our only source of IBLs.

If just creating a standalone domain with no "risky" links to possibly bad networks was enough to grab #1s again, why do you think we haven't all discovered this already?

Bill, no one suggested you'll rank #1 by building a domain and not linking to crap. You obviously need people linking to you to rank.