Comments on: Anatomy of a Google Filter/Penalty (or how not to do nofollow PR sculpting)

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:05:53 +0000

An interesting follow up would be to see how far you can go, before you get a penalty.

By: Spencer Davies

Spencer Davies — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:51:06 +0000

I am reading this post with interest, I have spent many hours gathering related links and creating unique content, with the end user in mind. Our site had held a page one rank one position for many key word searches for at least two years. The site has just received a -60 penalty/filter. I have removed new content added within the last month, hoping that the site will regain its original positioning, which it hasn’t as yet. The front page is holding pr2 at present. http://www.sdccleaning.co.uk

Regards

Spencer

By: michaelj72

michaelj72 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:34:52 +0000

interesting article and evidence. not sure what conclusions i can draw but i will definitely keep it in mind about making on page changes slowly, i think i’ve seen a fall at times because of that too. since i don’t use the no-follow at all, that hasn’t been a factor.
thanks again

By: Neyne

Neyne — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:43:03 +0000

@santhos – that is an interesting approach (discontinuous optimization) although i agree with Zulu that it cannot be one link that did it for you

@Zulu – were your changes country and keyword specific ? Since the post was written, I’ve seen at least two more cases with the exact same filtering applied (country + keyword specific). In both cases the reason for the filter was keyword abuse in the anchor text of the sitewide link pointing to homepage. After seeing this, I went back to this post and it looks to me like what happened was that slapping nofollow on so many links increased the amount of link juice going through the over-optimized link pointing to homepage, thus triggering the overoptimization filter. As you can see from the dates in the chart, all of this happened at the end of 2007-beginning of 2008, supposedly before Google killed the whole on-site nofollow sculpting. Obviously, I cannot prove this, but it fits the scenario better than the initial red flag story i thought it was.

By: Zulu Digital

Zulu Digital — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:16:13 +0000

I disagree. Optimisation should be continuous and Google would not punish you with drops in rankings for receiving a couple of links from bad networks. At the end of the day, they realise that you will more than likely not have control over such links – else SEO firms could sabotage each others’ campaigns!

The graph within the article is an interesting one, and does well to provide an insight into the workings of the Google algorithm. Unfortunately, even though you monitored the changes you made to the site in terms of SEO, there may have been contributing factors for the sudden drops/improvements, behind the scene.

I’ve seen some similar positional fluctuations for one of my projects, and at times I think it’s most probably due to minor changes in the algorithm. It is important to remember that whilst we only really hear about major changes to the algorithm, Google makes hundreds of amends each year – and any one of them could disagree with your site, resulting in significant positional changes.

By: Santhos Webdesign

Santhos Webdesign — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:08:23 +0000

Interesting post, although it’s a bit old

I’ve seen this happening a couple of times to my site when I didn’t change anything about it… The only reason I can think of is that I got an extra backlink which in Google’s opinion came from a bad neighbourhood or something…

I sometimes think you should stop optimizing once your ranking is good, and only start with it when your falling down. A small step in optimizing can break your rankings…

By: forex online essentials

forex online essentials — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:57:25 +0000

Duplicate content has become the big area of misinformation with everyone concerned that they have hit a “duplicate content filter”, or been penalized for duplicate content. Chances are you haven’t been banned or penalized unless you really have very little unique content on your entire site. For this reason, I’d thought I’d dig a little bit further into dupe content and remedies so I have a reference document for later.

By: Doorlopend Krediet

Doorlopend Krediet — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 20:02:37 +0000

First of all thank you for this article, it was a interesting read with good up to date data. Defiantly don’t agree on every point, pointed out, I’m not sure if the reason of the penalty was the switch and change of focus on product. Should be interesting information to get feedback on. I’ve been trying different SEO strategies on various sites with all heights of PRs, but can’t say I ever changed a focus. Looking forward hearing feedback, with best regards,

Doorlopend Krediet

By: Kinderstoelen

Kinderstoelen — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:10:00 +0000

I realy Like This articel I didn’t ever was realy atracted too it but now I see what its all about I am Getting More And More Intresterd in it, and The Articel it self is very good formulated and got Lots of falluw information,
thanks for it I will keep on chekking this blog.

By: lenen bkr a2

lenen bkr a2 — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:34:39 +0000

Is it possible to ask Google for explanation why you get a penalty?