Google Rumor Mill: New "Minus 30" Penalty

There're now strong rumors of a new Google penalty called "the Minus 30 Penalty" - talk is of it being an over-optimization penalty, but you know how reliable these conjectures are.

The interesting thing is that the penalty is not a ban, but a bump down of 30 spots. So it's nearly impossible to tell if you dropped because of a penalty, your own on-site issues, changes by your competitors, etc (whereas with a ban it was pretty clear what happened and steps you could take to lift the ban).

Goddamn moving target... it's almost as if Google just wants to make our jobs more difficult, go figure.

Updated: There's vigorous discussion on Threadwatch where speculation is that this penalty is only for minor infractions and will be lifted as soon as the "problem" is fixed, and/or that it is a time-limited thing that goes away after some time (although what the point of that would be from Google's perspective, I don't know).

Other rumors in various forums is that this is a replacement for the Google Sandbox, which seems unlikely to me since the Sandbox filter serves a different function. Remember, this "minus 30 penalty" is hitting sites that were ranking well, and then inexplicably dropped, rather than brand new sites. Matt Cutts, to date, has not addressed questions about the minus 30 penalty on his blog.


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Posted by Melanie Phung

Wednesday, October 18, 2006 6
Comments

Posted by Anonymous Heather: 3:54 PM, October 18, 2006

It's hard to say what Google does behind the scenes. You just have to keep working and hope for the best.

Posted by Blogger Melanie Phung: 8:19 PM, October 18, 2006

Hi Heather,
You're right - it's hard to know exactly what any of the search engines are doing. But in e-commerce you can't just rely on hope.

You have to make smart decisions, test, analyze, adjust, test some more, rinse and repeat. Sometimes it's even better to stop what you're doing and just observe.

Like I say: SEO is half science, half art, and half magic.

The good ones can master all three.

p.s. I like that slider functionality on your site. Nifty.

Posted by Anonymous Google SEO Tips: 6:23 AM, October 31, 2006

Is this penalty the same as page 4 penalty being discussed in some other foums? And does it apply only to top ranked sites? I guess so as it would be manually impossible to keep track of millions of sites.

Posted by Blogger Melanie Phung: 5:26 PM, October 31, 2006

Yes, the minus 30 penalty would be the same thing as being pushed down to page 4 from a page 1 result. Anecdotal reports show this happening with sites ranked #1 for branded terms. None of the sites I manage have suffered from this new Google penalty though, and it's hard to gather sufficient evidence to draw very many conclusions.

Posted by Anonymous Heather: 11:54 AM, November 08, 2006

Thanks for your kind words, Melanie.

Google is always making changes to their programs. They are constantly trying to improve their algos by tweaking here and there.

They are doing the same thing for their Adwords and Adsense programs, too.

Posted by Blogger anthony: 11:09 AM, November 18, 2006

Ugh -- after being devastated by the 30 penalty rule, I broke out and am back in my normal 1-5 rankings. Since I was so clueless as to why I was penlized I felt I should post what I *think* I did to cure this.

I was also freaking out because a lot of sites said if you get hit by the 30 ranking penalty you'd need to switch domains. Don't do that ... there's hope.

I came across a word document (it's probably fake) that was rumored to be release by a Google employee who broke the NDA.

Anyhow the doc (whether fake or not) did give me insights... it specifically talked about thin affiliates and even more specifically about linking to Hotels to get affiliate money.

I was desperate so I went ahead and took off all my hotel links. I wasn't using them as affiliates whatsoever.. what I was doing is linking to host hotels for some events being held to help my web surfers shortcut to the hotels... nothing spammy or affilate whatsoever...

Google must have thought I was profiting as a thin affiliate... and tripped me up with 30 rankings down.

I made a lot of other changes too so cannot be sure that THAT is what tripped me up... however, as soon as I fixed that... I was back to where I needed to be..

So now.. how the heck to I link to the hotels? Maybe I can put a "nofollow" in the link.. Not sure.. or maybe a JavaScript link of some sort?

Hope this helps anyone else out there!!

-Anthony

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