What is this penalty?

[brinked]

There are so many google penalties..I think many believe that there are only a few penalties, although many are similar, I think google applies these penalties on a case by case basis.

I have a site about 4 months old...ranks #1 for its targetted keyword, theres very little competition for it. When it wasnt in penalty it was also ranking #1 for its plural versions of the keyword as well as different variations of the keyword.

All its inner pages have the -950 penalty applied to them.

Does anyone have any idea what penalty this might be able how to get out of it?

[tedster]

Others have mentioned this kind of thing here - and always on a relatively young website. I think there's a good chance it's not a penalty at all and rather a tightening up of the trust qualifications for new sites. The earlier good rankings may have been a kind of temporary test, something I call the "honeymoon period".

With a site that is 4 months old, unless you know of certain practices you've used that Google asks you not to, I'd advise that you continue to develop a good site and attract backlinks.

All its inner pages have the -950 penalty applied to them.

The -950 can be a tricky thing to zero in on. Matt Cutts only comment has been that it was designed to catch too much SEO. What symptoms are your seeing that look like -950? Are these the same searches that previously gave you a high ranking?

[brinked]

hi Ted,

yes, my pages focus on keyphrases that don't have much competition. the inner pages all are on the last page of results when I know they should be ranking top ten like they used to. Too much SEO....i guess that may be the problem..I have seo friendly URL's keywords in page title and keywords in H1 tag..although my pagetitle, url and H! tag all have the words arranged differently.

[MrStitch]

Pull out too many instances of your keywords, and start thinking 'related terms', that have no parts of the original.

Not sure if it'll fix your problem entirely, but you've got nothing to loose, right?

[brinked]

mrstitch...yeah thats what I will probably end up doing, ill wait to see if the new backlinks improve anything..if not ill try to perhaps maybe remove all the h1 tags and the text within them.

[greenfrog]

I think that I am facing something similar with an over SEO. My issue is that I showed up briefly for a top keyword at 7 in the results. Then about 2-3 days later I dropped back down to where I have been hovering around 110 or so. So I dropped about 95-100 spots and now I am there.

Is this a penalty, or an overly SEO'd issue? I was so happy for about 2-3 days and I even got some conversions because of the new keyword rank. I've been plagued by this for very long and to see me get a good ranking briefly is very frustrating.

[brinked]

i just replaced the H1 tags with B tags...lets see if that hopefully effects anything.