google -950
 

has anyone here been penalized for it? if so, how did you get out of it?

thanks

Just beg and plead and send them lots of free booze.

you fuckin shit head-

i should have know not to ask a question like that here

Yes, i have had in total 4 domains 950'd. Only for the most competitive terms on the domains, they still ranked top in long tail keywords and also high in image searches.

I have pulled 3 out (1 is still in-and-out). 2 were almost certainly "theme" type failures, ie nonrelevant out of theme backlinks (large percentage of total) and the 3rd was fixed (not totally, it bounces in and out) by "de-keywording" my pages, in all aspects, text, image, structure etc.

This is all speculation because the other 1 i still cant pull out. So it leaves me far from the master, it still gives me about a 75% kill rate.

950 sucks balls, id almost rather be totally banned. It drives me batty and had me up for many nights.

wtf does 950'd mean

In layman's terms, they put your domain back to the 950th (or therein) result for its keyterms. Which is usually past what are displayed in results, you need to click to the end and select "show less relevant results" to even get them to show you the full 1000 results. Thats about 95-100 pages back.

It's a trigger type penalty, and many sites have come out. There isn't one single factor that sets it off, but a collection of things, or any one of numerous things. It was fairly controversial when first instituted, as sites like audi.com were 950d for their own brand search.

thanks for the response,

Recently this week i optimized my site which was ranking #1 for several keywords - i also got a back link that gave me an addtional 7k backlinks ( i only had 500) - mind you i was a site wide link but still i wasn't sure if that put up a red flag. The more i read on this it seems to throw you into the 950 for over optimization OR the internal linking within your site ( both of which i was guilty of doing.

thank god this was a little side biz i had because i wouldn't want to rely on Google to put food on my table :winkwink:

Since its all so recent, i would try de-optimizing the page again, and quite possible losing that sitewide links. It would have to be a damn good site for me to want 7k backlinks to a domain of mine that was ranking allready. 7k and you had 500, so a massive chunk of the links all came from the one place, again, you would want it to be quite the site or i can def see issues.

From what i can see, if you can identify and fix the issues, the site comes back out relatively fast, since you know what changes were made, unmake them.

even a search for your sitenames is showing up that low, as well as all keywords?

Yeah, thats what i did. i went over board the other day and it seems like thats what caused it. i just de-optimized the page, got rid of mostly all my internal links aside from my navigation and got rid of that site wide link. I'll post back here to see if that did the trick.

keywords yes...if you type the site name in directly it comes up -- ex. if you type in bluewidgets it comes up - type in blue widgets and it doesnt.

that what happens for me at least but it's so up and down for different search terms. Some search terms im still number 1 -- others ( Mostly all of em) im at the last page (ie 950'ed)

Jdoughs how long did it take you to get those 3 sites out from the 950 area and did they return to their same rank before you were 950'd?

I bought a site a few months back that looks to be 950'd. Have you found any solutions to getting it out of the penalty? It seems the previous owner optimized pretty hard, but I've seen much worse that haven't been hit.

The one that i corrected with proper linking took almost 2 months, but naturally, when you need to correct link structure, it takes time to get the new links settled etc.

The one that was de-optimized i noticed it back within a week or two. The third bounces in and out. I think its a combination of both above, plus the fact it had a substantial content change, after years of being consistent.

this might be of help if anyone bumps into this thread...


---plucked from another board --

I found this thread a few weeks ago & it made me realize that I possibly had the "over optimization" penalty in my site's navigation structure. I fixed the issue & all my rankings returned within a few days. I was thrilled!

We had lost most of our rankings since August, but there were a few that were never dropped. I'm not sure it was the 950 penalty. but it was definitely some sort of penalty for highly relevant terms that we used to rank within the top 5 results for.

Our site navigation included all of our services pages, down to sub-categories. It is a CSS-based drop-down navigation, so all the html links appeared on every page. It was something like a main category of Widgets. With 4 sub-categories that could be something like widgets by shape, widgets by color, widgets by material, widgets by size. Then under those categories there were more widget phrases such as red widgets, blue widgets, green widgets. This was never intended to be spammy, it was completely user-friendly navigation from our perspective. We wanted visitors to be able to go exactly where they wanted from any page on our site. We had this navigation for more than 2 years without any negative effect on our rankings.

So, after reading this thread I decided to modify the navigation as a test. I kept Widgets as the main category. Then kept widgets by color. Then all the pages within that category I changed to just red, green, blue, etc. Basically I removed all the extra widgets used in the navigation as long as the main category already used it. I still think this makes the navigation less clear for users, especially if they hit a sub-page from a search engine. But Google likes it. All my rankings came back to exactly where they were before.

I did not change any page names, page text, or titles or meta tags. I only changed the phrases used in the global navigation structure.

At first (in about 2 days) I saw about 25% of the rakings bounce back & I was able to verify that those were from pages cached after the navigation change was made. I was able to track for the next few days which pages were cached next & I could then predict the new search rankings based on those newly cached pages. The cause & effect was pretty clear. After about 5 days, all the important pages had been re-cached & our rankings all bounced back. I really can't belive this navigation issue was the cause of our ranking penalty since it didn't occur to me to be spammy in any way. I feel like I almost lost my job over it. But at least I finally figured it out.

i have 2 sites in this situation too :(
and i have another one that 1 week ranks on first page for some good keywords then for a period go down...

I got one of those as well, jumping from #2 one day down to nowhere for like a week and bouncing back again.

For most ranking penalties, I see quite good results with the following:

- Pull masses of spammy links, point them to little link laundering satellite sites on your topic instead, freehosted sites on authority domains do a good job for example.

- Change the anchor text of incoming links, too many links with all the same anchor text regularity trigger those penalties, at least for newer sites

- Make sure to update the site once done

- Slow down with link building. Keep adding links, don't just sit and wait, but focus on quality.

- Do NOT overuse social bookmarking sites, a newer domain with a big % of links coming from social bookmarking services gets beaten down like there is no tomorrow quick

thank you for the infos

i do not spam, i use different anchors, i have links from good sites
but the reason should be the big number of 404, i have to finish it.

Woooaaahhhh relax

I just brought another domain out of the 950 penalty. (and added 2 more, rofl)

It was dropped, it had a massive content change, it had a massive ammount of links tossed at it fast. And it was as spammy as a hotmail account.

I de-keywordized the pages, dropped internal keyword based links, rewrote fresh content. And pointed strong links at it, not all relevant either, just strong ones. Did this all about 3 weeks to a month ago and its been out of 950 for 7-8 days now.

Long enough for me to know its out for real.

I had to have sex with CEO of Google and believe you me it was an ugly experience!