Does google penalize indvidual pages or just entire sites?

Can Google Make a Mistake?

[ffctas]

Hi All,

I understand google's methods are quite complicated and very hard to decipher. However, are their methods truely consistent.

For example, we sell widgets, up until the March 2007 update we ranked well for all of our top terms. After the update most of the terms went back to close to their previous postions.

This with the exception of "widget" and "blue widget". "Red widget", "green widget", "yellow widget", etc are all Ok and rank in the top 5

The site is well indexed with over 9000 pages including the "widget" and "blue widget" pages. These pages are not ranked within the top 200.

Does google penalize indvidual pages or just entire sites? Is it possible that google "overlooked" individual pages? Is there any way to analyze what might have occured?

Any help is appreciated

[tedster]

Google can penalize individual pages, or even just individual links on particular pages. They also can invoke a penalty just for certain search terms and not others, as in the so-called -950 penalty [webmasterworld.com] - so look toward the end of results for your url, not just the first 200 results.

And of course, Google can make a mistake, too.