Google’s 950 Penalty
I was asked to look at a website today that had suddenly dropped in Google’s search results. Now when I say dropped, I mean DROPPED… from page 1 to page 950!
My first though was they’ve been penalised by Google with the dreaded 950 penalty, that’s the penalty used for sites who’re penalised for obtaining paid links for SEO purposes (950 refers to the last page of the Google results pages).
My first SEO instinct was to check the backlinks of the said website and to see where it had obtained these links and to also check the anchor text used for these links. My suspicions were confirmed. It seems that the site had agreed with an owner of a blog network to purchase links using highly competitive keywords as anchor text, Google found out and penalised the site using the 950 penalty.
My advise to the site owner… remove the links and wait a week or two till Google realises that the links have been removed, most likely, the 950 penalty will then be removed by Google.
I’ll let you know what happens, stay tuned…
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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omar said,
March 11, 2008 @ 9:49 am
Update..
the site in question removed the links and using Google’s webmaster Tools:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
requested a re-inclusion. The site has now been de-penalised.