SEO Report – Story of the 950 Penalty

Is there really a 950 penalty in Google (meaning a sharp drop in rankings from page one to the last result on page 10 of the SERPS?) You be the judge. Our experience with one client certainly seemed to support the possibility!

The Google 950 penalty is a scenario when a website suddenly slips down the Google rankings to bottom ranking, a shift of around 950 places. For example if a site was previously ranking number 1 for a particular keyword but is now the last result on page 10 off Google search results, this would mean that the site has now shown a drop of 950 places hence the term 950 penalty.

Many people believe that the Google 950 penalty does not exist, this is may or may not be true, recently a webmaster approached us saying that his site had been hit by the Google 950 penalty, the webmaster said he had been ranking well for a few keywords however now he was on page 10 of the search results. Instantly we understood that the webmaster had been hit by the Google 950 penalty. In fact until then we were not really sure if the Google 950 penalty existed, but now that we have helped a webmaster who has been penalized by Google, we know think there might be some weight in the Google 950 penalty theory.

The first step that we carried out was to look through the site, and we figured out that the site had serious coding problems; it was not even HTML compliant let alone XHTML compliant. One of the first things we did was clean up the code of the site, and then made it XHTML 1.0 compliant. Many search engine optimization firms have ignored the importance of the XHTML validation but we felt that making the site XHMTL compliant helped. Since we carried out a lot of steps we are not sure which one exactly worked, but by listing all the major steps we carried out we hope to help other sites get out of the Google 950 penalty.

The next step that we carried out was removing any duplicated content and pages from the site, in earlier blog entries too we have stressed on how Google is cracking down on improper SEO practices, and even if by accident a site has duplicate content then it should definitely make sure it cleans it up ASAP. In this case also we removed all duplicity from the site.

Once we had removed any duplicate content from the site, we also made sure that the site’s structure as well as the structure of all the pages on the site was SEO friendly, in addition to correcting pages that were ill structured; we also carried out optimization of the supplemental pages. By optimizing all the pages on the site we ensured that there were no search engine optimization related discrepancies on the website.

The final step in helping the site with better rankings was getting back links from established sites, instead of paying for high PR links we actually got the customer genuine links from niche sites and directories related to the site. This way we ensured that the site was not picked up by the Google paid links algorithm. Once all the steps were complete within a month or so the site is now back in the top 20 rankings in Google.

What causes the Google 950 penalty? We really cannot say, in fact we are still not a 100% sure that the Google 950 penalty exists, but what he have done is mention the steps we took to help a webmaster get his site back from the Google 950 penalty.