Google Penalties
by Jay Bhatti on August 2, 2009
These penalties are speculation, and penalty numbers are neither an exact nor a precise measure of the exact ranking change associated with each penalty. A penalty of -N means that a site will drop (approximately) N positions in Google’s returned results, equivalent to falling N/10 pages from the front page.
| Certainty |
Description |
Penalty |
Potential Solution |
| High |
Site is overly-optimized for a certain keyword |
-6 |
Do not overly stress a single keyword. |
| High |
Site is a low-content gateway to another site (a doorway site) or has many redirects |
-30, hurts both sites |
Create unique, high content sites with high-quality links and avoid JavaScript redirects (use a 301) and doorway pages. |
| Medium |
Backlinks to site have over-optimized or uniform anchor text |
-50 |
Use natural language and vary your backlink anchor text and use ‘nofollow’ where appropriate to prevent Google from crawling a link. |
| Medium |
Site appears to be involved in a link-farming scheme |
-60 |
Avoid site-wide links, links from ‘bad neighborhoods’, paid links, and links from low-quality directory sites while building quality links with varied anchor text. |
| Low |
Site appears to be a spam site (a meta-penalty taking into account all the above penalties and more) |
-950 |
Avoid other penalties while also maintaining a content-rich, clean site with good html. Avoid over-optimization. |
| Low |
Site is hacked or purely a spam or scam site |
delist |
Failure. Start over. |
