Google's 950 Penalty - Part 10

[netmeg]

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< related threads: -950 Quick Summary [webmasterworld.com] -- -950 Part One [webmasterworld.com] >

I have two urls that were 950'd on Friday. Unfortunately they are my two most requested urls (other than the home page) - they'd been #1 in the SERPS for at least three years, and now only show up on the last page for the most common search phrase. They both showed PR previously, but TBPR has been greyed out since the last update. However, in certain permutations of the search phrase, they they still rank #1. The search string usually comprises the city name and the event, and often includes the year.

Example:
city event - 950'd
city event 2007 - 950'd
event city - #1
city state event - #1
city state event 2007 - #1

As far as I can tell, it is ONLY two urls, out of around 500, that fell into this (so far, anyway)

What it all means, I have no idea.

[edited by: tedster at 9:14 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2008]

[Marcia]

>>Using straight keywords in internal links

What's meant by straight keywords there?

[SEOPTI]

Maybe he means "straight ahead" to Googleplex :)

[Marcia]

I'm thinking maybe excessive use of exact phrases, that can be an issue.

[tigertom]

You guys are too technical for me.

Consider this: There are automatic content generators out there that make quite convincing looking websites from lists of keywords.

A regular website made by a regular joe wouldn't look like that.

[CainIV]

The same issue has happened to me, and I have gotten out of it.

It was due to one of the following:

Too many sweet words on pages
Too many keyword rich links leaving pages
Too much keyword links in the nav
Too many pointed links at domain home page with keywords
Too close of a match between page theme, inbound link anchor text and H1

What I did was:

Reduced pages and rewrote for visitors and deemphasized SEO altogether.

Reduced the number of in content links to ther other pages to 2-3 unless it really helped the visitor, and deoptimized those so that they did not exactly match the landing page keyword theme

Changed nav to not include keyword in every link unless absolutely necessary for visitors

Found high quality links to inner pages and the home page and only a few to home using my main keyword. The rest I asked them to link to me using what they thought was best

Deoptimized H1 tags to include keyword but not a shortened or EXACT phrase.

Went from 950 to 9th in Google about 3 months ago and have stayed ever since.

Hope this helps

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[edited by: tedster at 11:33 pm (utc) on Oct. 18, 2008]